Disclaimer: If I owned Making Fiends….well I don't so what's the use?
I
Revelations of a young girl
Mr. Milk had considered running away several times. It just wasn't fair- he had moved to Clamburg High School purely to escape Vendetta and her tormenting fiends, and for a few, blissful years he had taught maths to bland, boring students who'd kept their heads down, done well and made him proud. Mr. Milk's posture had improved, and without the constant stress, his hair had begun to grow back.
The time had flown by so fast that the dreaded date had simply crept up on him, and when he'd heard the news, he'd screamed out loud and fainted, wisps of hair already coming loose from his scalp.
Vendetta was entering her freshman year.
At fourteen, her ego, villainous ideals and wicked nature had drastically increased, and the lessons were torturous. Thank goodness he only had to teach her for eight periods per fortnight, instead of all day every day. Even so, Mr. Milk's confidence, which he had carefully built up over the past five years, had begun to drain away. He'd tried to fight it. He would spend hours planning ways to teach the others in that class, leaving Vendetta to her own devices.
Some days he would actually accomplish something, as the moody tyrant would be absorbed in a magazine, on others she would be painfully attentive, screaming 'No MATH!' the instant he picked up his chalk. And sometimes the weight of it all would get to him, and he would find himself too distraught to even try.
'This morning, I'm gonna do it,' he'd say as he left his house and started down the street each morning, 'I'll leave Clamburg.' But every day, his feet, almost by themselves, took him back to school.
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Marvin seated himself in his usual spot at the front of the class, shivering slightly in the chilly weather. He took out his books sleepily, wondering whether he would need to use them. Everything to do with school centred around Vendetta's temperament, and the class waited with bated breath for the fiend-maker to arrive. Marvin looked across at Charlotte, seated beside him. Her cheerful face was drawn into a determined expression as she bent over her book, long blue curls spilling over her shoulders. Of late, Charlotte's art skills had improved- her drawings, beautiful creations, left a cheery hue to the dismal town (before specially designed fiends tore them from the walls and ate them).
Charlotte looked up at Marvin through long-lashed blue eyes.
'Hey, Marvin, what do you think?' she held up her latest work, a swirly pattern of delicate-looking flowers surrounding a heart.
Marvin studied the picture, then smiled at his girlfriend. 'My- my dear, that's great!'
She giggled, fluttering her eyelashes at him.
'Thanks, Marvin- do you think Vendetta'll like it? Maybe it'll cheer her up!' The girl turned back to her work, singing to herself:
'Vendetta, Vendetta, you are a good friend…'
Marvin sighed as she sang away. As fond as he was of her, her ignorance astounded him. Five years Charlotte had been in Clamburg now- five years!- and still, in her eyes, Vendetta was nothing more than a 'mysterious, but nice' girl, who could make 'pretty animals'.
Couldn't she see how…dangerous Vendetta was?
The door creaked and opened a few inches. The small group of students cowered in fear. Maggie and Mort's card game scattered across the room. Marion grabbed Malachi in terror, then the two realised what they were doing and jumped apart.
Marvin's heart hammered. Only Charlotte did not react with fright, looking up with bright expectation in her eyes.
Everyone sighed, a wave of relief washing over them as Mr. Milk stumped in.
'Um…good morning…class,' he stuttered in his trembling voice. 'T-today, we can learn about, um, Pythagoras' theorem?' With a trembling hand, he began to draw a triangle on the blackboard. 'Now, um, there is…a simple rule…'
The wooden door slammed against the wall. Gasps rang out through the classroom as the lumbering form of Grudge clumped through the doorway. Behind him came the young pigtailed overlord, scowling as she marched to her seat, although inwardly pleased that after all these years she still hadn't lost her edge. Casting dark looks at her classmates, Vendetta settled into her seat and began flicking through a tatty issue of Death Magazine.
Mr Milk stood at the front of the room, paralysed for a second. His beady eyes darted between the fiend-maker and her fiend, both of whom were absorbed. The red snake that had made its home on his desk that year, reminding him of a sharp-toothed bird of old, had gone to sleep. The teacher stole one more glance at Vendetta- the girl had donned a set of headphones, from which the faint sound of dark music could be heard.
Winking at his class, he turned back to the board and finished his diagram, speaking in hushed tones while the class sat in a terrified silence.
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There were only ten minutes left of the lesson when Maggie began to feel faint. Her head spun. Over the past few years, Maggie had begun to hallucinate, having visions of the future. The first time, her parents had been worried, but in a world where strange giant animals maintained control of town, and a fourteen-year-old-girl reigned supreme, they had to become resigned to the fact that anything could happen. The doctor in Molding had been unable to discover the cause of these visions, but found in her system a fiendish poison he'd been unable to remove.
As had occurred a few times before, Maggies' mind spun uncontrollably into a strange epileptic trance. She fell to the floor, wailing and writhing.
'Charlotte!' she moaned. The blue girl turned, an unknowing smile on her face.
'The loyalty of your loved ones shall be tested!'
'Oh yay!'
Had her eyes not been glazed over, Maggie would surely have rolled them. Her head jerked towards Vendetta. 'The fiend-maker!'
Vendetta turned her headphones down but pretended not to listen.
'You shall discover an emotion inside you which may affect your reign of terror!'
'Sure. Whatever.' Vendetta muttered, going back to her magazine.
'And YOU!' Maggie stabbed a purple finger in Marvin's direction, 'Will stumble upon your fate in sleep!'
She twitched a few times and then woke up, leaving everyone to stare at her, confused and astounded.
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The night was stormy and black. In his little house, Marvin pulled the covers up around his neck and shivered. Maggie's ominous words echoed in his brain: You will stumble upon your fate in sleep.
What did it mean?
Was he to dream of his future? Marvin shuddered again at the thought as he fell asleep.
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Vendetta leaned on the arm of her chair, gazing out the window. The television was blaring, but the girl wasn't interested, instead staring at the patterns the raindrops made on the glass. The gears of her young brain whirred as she sat, sketching out plans for new fiends in her head.
'That idiotic girl Charlotte keeps sending me stupid drawings!' she muttered crossly to herself. 'What I need is something with sharp claws that can tear through paper, or perhaps something really inventive, like a fire-breathing, paper-shredding…'
The doorbell rang; a metallic clanging sound. Vendetta's eyes drifted towards the door.
'Hamster!' she drawled in her rusty, Bulgarian accent. A grunt sounded from the other side of the room as Grudge dragged himself over to answer the door.
'Ooh, Grudge, you're still as cute as ever!' Charlotte floated into the living room, wearing her characteristic dazed expression.
'Hi Vendetta!'
There was a crash as Vendetta hurled a shoe at the agonising girl, which missed and shattered a vase.
'I brought you a new…' the other shoe hit the wall.
'-picture! Isn't it pretty?' She unrolled the poster-sized piece of butcher's paper to reveal a sickening concoction of swirls and flowers and hearts, scribbled in several ghastly shades of pink. Vendetta's rage bubbled over. She closed her eyes, but the images was burned on the back of her eyelids. The green girl roared in fury.
'Why must you torment me with your stupidity? Your constant cheerfulness, your vile singing, and now THIS! Why?'
Charlotte grinned. 'Because, Vendetta, you're my BEST FRIEND!'
She jumped on Vendetta, crushing her in a tight hug. The pigtailed girl squirmed to get free.
'HAMSTER!'
It took more effort on Grudge's part to pry Charlotte away than it used to. Like Vendetta and the others, Charlotte had grown bigger and stronger, and as she had grown, her heart had increased in size too. Her excessive loving capacity coupled with her overwhelming tactlessness and ignorance of all evil made her all the more unbearable to Vendetta, who frequently ditched school to avoid her.
Vendetta's mood was black as the night outside as she stormed back to her seat. The picture lay on the floor at her feet, where it had fallen as Charlotte was dragged out by the loyal Grudge. The fiend-maker screwed up her face in anger, and proceeded to tear it into tiny pieces.
'Stupid Charlotte,' she growled, 'Stupid blue girl!' She threw the pieces across the room, where they fluttered to the floor, and a tentacled fiend swept them away.
A tapping sounded at the window, and Vendetta groaned.
'Now what?'
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Across the path, the figure of Marvin stumbled along, sleepwalking. The unconscious boy stepped forward, unaware of what he was doing, and an unknowing hand reached out and knocked three times on the window. The sound woke Marvin from his slumber, and he found himself, to his surprise, standing in front of a rickety old building, shrouded by mists- a place only the brave, or Charlotte, dared to approach.
He was standing outside Vendetta's house.
A/N: Well, that was slightly weird, especially the Maggie vision part, but that will get explained in a later chapter, I promise. Well, what do you think so far?
