I did an edit on one of my worst parts.
I woke up to see the ceiling of my room, and the sound of Erica slightly injuring someone. "Ouch! Hey! Ahhhh! I told you, it was an accident! No, I did not intend to mow you down and get- OOF!" Classical cries of pain, but Erica was going easy on this person. If she weren't she would be knocked out cold by now. It sounded more like torture than assault too, but Erica was also screaming angrily. Interesting.
"Uhhh..." My head still hurt, and I felt groggy. Erica stopped kicking the other person and came over to me. There was a sound of someone slumping to the floor and moaning.
"Are you alright?" Erica asked me, coolly but not angrily. Whew. A wave of relief washed over me.
"I thought you were going to start whacking me too," I told her.
"Hmm? Ah yes, I was mildly attacking her," she said, motioning to the person slumped on the floor. "She's the one who ran us over, landing us in the school infirmary for a week. You, luckily, slept through half of it."
"Wait, I was ran over?" I cried, alarmed. This was my third time getting alarmed in one day. Or in one conscious 24 hour period, at least. The person who Erica was unleashing her rage on stood up and limped over.
Erica elbowed her one last time, bringing yet another yelp of pain. "Ouch! I'm sorry, alright? Please stop injuring me," she pleaded. She was the girl who was on the ATV earlier. She looked towards me and said some apology, but I was distracted by her beauty. She was as pretty as Erica was, maybe more. And her eyes were wide and luminous, and friendly, kind of like Jessica…
"You can't be Jessica, right?" I asked, carefully, not wanting to agitate Erica by saying this.
"Close but not so," Erica said, still smouldering at the Jessica-like human being. "Meet my cousin, Stephanie Hale."
I was so stunned I couldn't speak. "Wha… Who.… How…"
"I am Erica's cousin on the Hale side, obviously, and also, Jessica's cousin and only close friend before you came along," she told me cheerily, despite the injuries inflicted on her by Erica.
"So you are a cousin to Erica AND Jessica?" I asked, confused at Stephanie's family tree.
"Yup. A cousin to two of the girls you had a crush on. I'm not related to Ashley Sparks, though."
"I d-did not have a crush on Jessica or Ashley," I stammered, flustered that this was known the first time I met this equally attractive person.
"Of course you did! Cyrus wrote all about it on his post-mission participant evaluation, how you were distracted by Jessica and Erica." She then leaned in and whispered to me, "I think something happened between you and her, based on her debriefing logs and my phone bugs." Erica, now very angry with Stephanie, kicked her in the stomach, making her stumble backwards.
"How did you bug my phone?" Erica asked, suddenly brandishing a can of pepper spray that was developed specially for "enhanced pain," making Stephanie scramble backwards, only to hit a wall.
"Prism," she said, her gaze suddenly hardening, "most devices connected to the internet can be cracked, and I know a lot of secrets about you, thanks to your extensive use of Google." Erica shoved the can in front of her eyes. A trickle of pepper spray liquid escaped, but Stephanie didn't flinch and continued talking, "Let's start with your room, shall we? Based on your searches on Amazon, you have a preference for… What was it? Oh yeah, kitte-"
"Oh sure, sure! I won't attack you or blame you for running us over, but one more word of anything, or you won't make it past the day with your limbs attached," Erica said, laughing nervously, without her usual demeanor. Stephanie stood back up and nodded, clearly wanting to keep her limbs.
It was just then that Mike, Zoe, and Jawa waltzed in.
"Whoa, what happened here?" Zoe yelped when she saw the injuries on Stephanie and the pepper spray. "Not an enemy agent, judging from the use of non-lethal force..."
"I'm Erica's cousin, and we had a fight." Erica frowned at this, but said nothing.
"I'll go get the nurse," Jawa said, running out the door.
"It was a small disagreement," Stephanie said, warily eyeing Erica's expression for any sign of agitation. There wasn't any, luckily.
"Hey, I'll get you to the nurse," Mike said, although he didn't need to, as Jawa had ran off to get the nurse. He flashed her his award-winning wolfish grin. Stephanie frowned at this, but followed him out the door.
That left me, Zoe, and Erica. Zoe slowly backed out of the room, obviously scared to be in the same room as someone who beat her own cousin to a pulp over a "small disagreement".
"Well, that leaves the two of us." Erica finally said.
"Who exactly is she and what is this prism thing and why are you attacking her?" I asked, unable to bear the confusion any longer.
It turned out, she was Alexander Hale's brother's daughter, but he never picked up the spy thing and instead went to the NSA and worked with cybersecurity. Cyrus got angry him for not going with the CIA so he never mentioned him to anyone (and besides, his identity was to be kept a secret). He later went to China, meeting Jessica's mother's sister, and marrying her. Their daughter was Stephanie. She and Jessica became fast friends in their childhood, and continued to be so after Stephanie had moved to the USA to attend the NSA Academy of Cybersecurity (more often referred to as the Snooping School, or Snoop School by it's own students), where she showed incredible talent and was the top of the class. In fact, it was Stephanie who changed Jessica's classes to public ones for her. It was around then that Erica found out about her anonymous cousin and sought her out. Both were interested in each other's subjects, and they tutored each other, and that was how Erica was a master of hacking various systems.
She, for an undisclosed reason, left Snoop School, hacked the CIA system, got enrolled into Spy School, and somehow earned the principal's favor in the process. However, due to her lack of skills, she was enrolled as a first year, instead of a fourth, which was what she hoped for. Then during the assault, which was actually a specially designed exam for Advanced Self-Preservation where you would get you extra credit if you made it out of the pit and managed to disarm the assailant, who was, of course, Erica Hale (I guess I was wrong; the professors are that harsh). That was when Stephanie, who somehow managed to get strapped onto an ATV and accelerate it, crashing into Erica, and then me.
This, however, had been interpreted as an improvised attack on Erica, giving her extra credit in a class in the next grade, and given her affinity with the principal, which was considered incredible, as the principal disliked most people and was disliked by pretty much everyone, she was jumped up to the second.
The prism turned out to be a government surveillance program, called PRISM. I guess I was right about the CIA watching us, though it was the NSA, not the CIA. Erica was angry because she had gotten bad grades for getting assaulted by Stephanie, giving her her first B (she would get nothing better than a B no matter how high her scores were). When I asked about what Stephanie was talking about, I got a fist in the face.
I was lying in the previous chapter. I wrote a short chapter because my writing skills stink on ice. I had to really push myself to get this glorious 1,316 words, which is over triple the amount of the previous chapter