It had been three Alternian months since the beginning of the season, and this was the first time Vriska had been late to practice.
She strode briskly into the building, adjusting her glasses and tucking her smooth hair behind her ear. She would never have broken into a run. She was much too prideful to show any sign of her own lack of time management. Preferring to maintain a controlled facade, she betrayed none of her racing thoughts on her face. Oh, and the thoughts she had at that moment! Most of them were related to stabbing, smashing, or otherwise maiming another troll, and all of those were trolls that had rejected her proposals. Simply, nobody was willing to help Vriska cheat her way into her manager's favor.
She stormed onto the ice, blades scraping the surface a tad harder than usual. Her students were idling near a wall, appearing altogether too calm. Equius was absentmindedly dabbing at his forehead with a small washcloth, a stoic expression painting his face. Nepeta had brought her crimson husktop and set it on the top of the wall. She tapped away at the keys, tail swishing in cheerful activity. Much too cheerful for the mood Vriska was in.
"I hope you two remember any of the routine," she grumbled. "You don't seem particularly focused." Both trolls turned to look at her, noting her presence for the first time that day.
"Pardon us, Vriska," rumbled Equius. "We were waiting for you."
"Really? I thought you were waiting for someone else," she snapped.
"You always tell us not to be late," Nepeta added. "Where were you? You don't seem the purrcatstinating type."
"I have a lot of irons in the fire!" she replied, louder than necessary. "I was visiting a lot of trolls today."
"I don't understand," Nepeta said. "Why can't you just use Trollian to talk to your furrends? That's what it's fur."
Of course, Vriska knew why she couldn't do that. Trollian was incredibly susceptible to the hacking types. She knew what Sollux could do with his uncanny talent. If he came across a sentence of her plan, he could reveal it all to Scratch without a second thought! But she couldn't betray a word of what she had tried to carry out. Her pupils were too fair. Too far on the side of the rule-followers. They would protest to cheating. Mother Grub's little royalty.
"It's none of your business," Vriska mumbled, unable to think of a half-decent excuse.
"Can't argue with that," Equius interjected. "Shall we run through our routine?"
"You people do that," said Vriska sharply, gliding back a few steps to provide the trolls adequate skating space. "But this time, I wanna see some core strength! Hope you've been eating your grubsauce, Nepeta." In reality, the feline troll had eaten no more grubsauce than usual. Instead, she had been practically nursed on lusus milk for the past months. She remembered poor Arthour, struggling to keep up with supplying two trolls at once with cream-saturated, protein-infused milk. That lusus needed help, she thought. But that didn't matter at that moment. What mattered was satisfying Vriska with a well-executed platter lift.
"Are you ready to impurress her?" she chirped to her partner.
"Yes, but don't be disappointed if we fail." Nepeta softened her expression.
"We'll do it. We'll do it togefur!"
"That pun is… quite a stretch."
"Yeah. I know."
Vriska tapped a button on a music player and the song began. It began like a distant thunderclap, deep and foreboding. A small number of frail string instruments sang a deliberate melody, building up to what would become a grander scale. The echo in the building somehow added to the atmosphere, although it did make it harder to follow. The rhythm was often lost in the sound's countless rebounds, but at least it was better than an absence of music altogether.
Equius poised himself several paces away from his partner, holding his chin up as elegantly as he could. Freezing his limbs in place, he patiently waited for the music cue. Seconds of silence. Then, pounding drumbeats. When the deepest strings began their ebb and flow, he began counting beats.
One. A breath in. Two. A breath out. Three. Equius swung his arm out and toward his chest. He allowed the momentum to carry his blades in a neat circle. Four. The rotation was complete, and he pushed off towards Nepeta.
Although she was facing away from him, she knew the exact moment to reach across her chest with both hands. Almost perfectly on beat, she felt Equius' large fingers snake their way around her back and across her delicate, pointed hands. The next beat was the time designated for them to push off together, but Equius came in a bit late. He dragged behind her for several beats, but that was soon remedied by a sudden, drawn-out pause in the music. He guided her hands around her head, rotating her to face him. He was a little bit strong here, and she rotated a bit too far.
In hold, they breezed away in sweeping, synchronized movements. Then, the first jump in the program. Equius abandoned any attempts in speeding up, but Nepeta did not. This was not a mistake. The increased momentum enabled him to carefully take hold of her and fling her away in a gorgeous throw toe loop. Ecstatic at landing it so perfectly, Nepeta whirled her head to see Vriska's reaction. To her dismay, the blueblood displayed no positive reaction.
One jump down, three more to go. As well as four lifts, two spins, a death spiral, and a step sequence. A bit disheartened at the lengths they would need to go to impress their tutor, both trolls continued their program.
The music was almost at its full volume, indicating for both skaters to begin counting between beats. Every one of the four beats they had been following was now to be replaced with three smaller ones. One, two, three. One, two, three. Swiftly, Nepeta eased forward in front of Equius. He took her by the waist with his right hand and by her hand with his left, each facing the outside of the rink. In this shadow position, they wove their feet in and out in graceful tracing steps. They swept in and out of this position, accelerating and decelerating artistically to create a beautiful contrast in their motions. They seemed almost like a steady breath. In. Out. One, two three. One, two three.
Their speed soon reached a suitable level to begin the next step. They each broke off from each other, creating a fair distance between them. On the cue of a certain swell in the music, both trolls launched into the air, rotating three times in a synchronized salchow. It was decently done, but Vriska still didn't seem to care. She stood there, stone-faced and judgemental.
It was at this moment that Nepeta began to feel a bit off. She wondered if the grubloaf she had eaten that morning had turned. But she couldn't focus on that. She had a program to finish, and plenty more jumps to land.
A combination spin was coming up next, and Equius was ready. He had always excelled in holding a position, even when factoring in balance and wind resistance. With his partner's hand grasped in his, they pushed off in a circle beside each other. They inclined their hips and backs to create two parallel lines while rotating. Nepeta could feel his sweat flecking upon her, but she had gotten quite accustomed to the sensation and instead focused on her increasing muscle aches.
They curled up into their designated positions after several beats. Nepeta's back was pressed against her partner's stomach, and he had her hand quite firmly in front of her. He felt that she was significantly less enthusiastic, and he wondered what was the matter. Intertwined in a spinning figure, they kept this position until the time came to ease out of it. Equius stood up straight, guiding his partner's hand to a more open position. At this point, neither of them cared about Vriska. Equius worried about Nepeta's morale, and she worried about her health.
Then came the moment of truth. The famed and infamous platter lift. Nepeta, although unwilling, prepared herself for the transition by extending one leg and tucking her tail up and under. She gave a small hop, assisting her partner in lifting her body into the air. Then, she felt something in her core muscles. A jarring contraction. A painful, stabbing cramp.
Equius' arms never faltered in a lift. When he felt Nepeta swaying above his head, he knew that there was something amiss on his partner's end. He neglected to rotate in the platter lift position. He was so cautious about his partner that he didn't care about his performance. Then, he heard her give a sharp squeak of pain.
Equius was prepared when Nepeta completely seized up. He halted the motion of his skates and caught her in her moment of intense pain. He quickly lowered her onto the bare ice, unsure of what to do.
"Vriska!" he called out to his coach, his voice cracking in surprise and slight panic. She did not answer, but instead hurried forward to investigate the state of the troll lying on the ice.
"Nepeta, where does it hurt?" demanded Vriska, shaking Nepeta's arm in an attempt to get her attention. She responded by pushing her arms toward her curled stomach. She felt unable to speak. If she did, she feared it would come out as a high-pitched yelp.
Vriska hesitated for a few seconds, and then muttered "It'll pass."
"What? No! She's hurt!" protested Equius, wildly gesticulating in his stress.
"What else are we going to do?!" Vriska snapped. "I don't know any doctors nearby!"
"There has to be someone!" He was pacing back and forth, sweating bullets as he attempted to rack his brain for a solution. Unfortunately, stressful situations were not the kindest to the poor troll's mind. "Healer. Doctor. Doc… Doc Scratch?"
Vriska laughed, but in a sort of cold-hearted bark. "Doc's just part of his name. Besides, I'm not going to see him. No way."
"He knows a lot more than we do!"
"No! We're not going to our manager for a medical problem!"
"Are we just going to let her lie there? She might be injured!"
"Unless this keeps her from skating forever, this isn't worth taking to Scratch." Vriska was growing more insistent, but Equius matched it every time.
"It could!"
"We are not going! End of discussion."
She wasn't caving in. Time to play the highblood card. He stiffened a bit to amplify his already gigantic stature.
"As your superior, I order you to take us to Doc Scratch."
"I don't care about your place on the hemospectrum! If we go, I could lose my job. I would lose everything! Do you want that to happen? Do you want to skate without support? To lose the competition?"
"Do you want Nepeta to lose her life?!" Equius roared.
"Please…" Nepeta said in a tiny, constricted voice. All parties fell silent. Equius and Vriska whirled around to face her. "Something's… wrong. Please… take me?"
"... Fine." Vriska sharply turned away, flicking her hair behind her. "I'll show you to his office. Then I'm out. Okay?"
Equius shouldered Nepeta as easily as he would a backpack. "Lead the way," he commanded.
It's always nice to have visitors around the office.
Of course, this particular instance was out of necessity and not out of a simple desire to see me, but I'll take the company whether the visitors are willing or not. These particular callers are and were completely loyal to me, which even now would be refreshing.
Ha. They're lucky. They have an omniscient spherical manager to run their little programs. Most skaters in the galaxy don't have such a luxury. If only that Vriska character was aware of how much power there exists embedded in my genetic code. Maybe she would have been a bit more grateful.
Perhaps she wouldn't have stolen from me.
I wasn't too worried about that. Vriska's mental abilities were… underused then, at the very least. She would never have figured out how to use the cue ball. My supreme intellect and powers of deduction could put that together easily.
I would say I have blathered on for much too long, but I measured out my rambling beforehand to give a concise yet sufficient few paragraphs for my readers to best judge my character. I'd say the pacing is slightly on the swift side, but we wouldn't want to trudge through a lengthy chapter, now would we? Ah, now for our unfortunate friends to arrive at my office.
Of course, I already knew precisely when they would exit the elevator on the fourth floor. However, I had to pretend to be surprised when Equius burst through the door of room thirteen. It added effect, despite the effort it took due to my lack of a physical face.
"Ah! If it isn't Equius and Nepeta, my star skaters!" I said to them with a gentlemanly flair. "Is Nepeta all right? Her limpness intrigues me."
"We don't know what happened. She says it hurts around her stomach," said Equius in that panicky tone of his.
"Nothing to worry about, nothing at all. You gave her milk, didn't you?" I watched the wheels spin in his head as he attempted to comprehend my intellect compared to his.
"I, uh… think she drank Arthour's milk… every day?"
"Well, there's your problem, young man. Never encourage an olive blood to ingest excessive amounts of lactose. They cannot digest it as well as others on the hemospectrum. Over time it begins to ferment in the stomach, and by then-" I cut myself off at that point. I had predicted that Equius had lost interest in my scientific explanations. In addition, Vriska was just slipping out of the doorway and trotting back to the elevator.
"Vriska!" I called to her, stern and powerful like the effective manager I am. I predicted her wincing at the sound of her name, then dragging her feet as she sulked back to my office.
"Yes, Mr. Scratch?"
"Stay here awhile. I will see to you when I am finished with my unhealthy patient." She grunted moodily in response. I gestured to a chair in the corner of the room, as dignified as I always have been. She sulked over and sunk down. I thought I caught a bit of concern for Nepeta in her defective eight-pupiled eye. She would never have admitted it. But I know. She's a living troll, after all.
"Is there something I can give her? A plant? Can olive bloods eat plants?" My goodness, this man was out of sorts. I would have to give her a dud just to soothe him. A placebo, if you will.
"Here, Nepeta." I knelt down by her side, procuring a bite-sized piece of ginger root from my inner coat pocket. "Chew on this and it'll be over in a moment." Oh, and don't ask why I have ginger in my pocket. The answer would be unfathomable to any mortal.
Nepeta nodded and accepted the herb. She began softly gnawing on it. It would have been adorable if I cared. Which I didn't. The ginger was, in reality, not going to have any effect on her health. Simply waiting for a few minutes would clear it up very well. This I know because of my extensive knowledge and deductive powers.
"Now, then," I said jubilantly, clapping my hands together like an authoritative figure would, "If you'll just take your feline friend and leave Vriska and I to chat, that would be lovely."
"Yes, sir." Shaking considerably, Equius hoisted his partner into his arms. She submitted like a little rag doll, still chewing on the ginger she had clutched in her hands. It was equal parts cute and pathetic. No, scratch that. Mostly pathetic. Both trolls vacated the room, leaving me to deal with the thief.
"So, Vriska," I said, sinking into the chair behind my polished cherry desk. "Are you enjoying your time with my useless little desk toy?" It was admittedly amusing to watch her guilty face contract to seem less guilty.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Good one. No, never mind. It was quite awful, considering you weren't telling a joke."
"Look, do you want it back?"
"Not unless you're finished." I reclined a bit, stretching my feet out under my desk. Never on top of the desk. That position is for ungentlemanly internmen.
She squinted, trying to puzzle out my meaning. "And what if I'm not?"
"Then you'll spend years of your life trying to decide whether or not you're finished."
"What do you want from me?"
"No sense in beating around the bush, then. I want you to return the ball to me."
"But I'm not finished."
"Finished with what, exactly?" She was growing much more frustrated. This was an entertaining game.
"I… want to keep it for a little longer."
"Why is that?"
"Do you need to know?"
"As your manager, I have the right to know."
"Fine. I think there's something deeper about this ball."
"You think there's something?"
"No. Well… yes."
"I don't believe thinking is quite enough, Vriska." I leaned forward in my chair. This was another businesslike pose, arms resting poised atop my desk. "I would politely request that you return what you have unlawfully stolen."
"But it's just as you said, Mr. Scratch. I'm not finished."
"Then I'll give you one chance before you're finished." Her eyes widened. The heightened stakes intimidated her. "If you or your students win the upcoming championship, the prize money goes to me. Then you may consider the ball purchased from me."
"That's a crazy offer."
"It's that, the ball, or a pink slip." The wheels in her head were really spinning.
"You drive a hard bargain, Scratch. But it's a deal." What a terrible decision, thoroughly foreseen by me.
"Excellent. I expect great things from you, Vriska. Don't disappoint me."
"That I can't guarantee."