All characters mentioned from the Bloody Roar series are copyright their respective owners.
2:17; only three minutes until detention. Now that I think about it, this was the only time that I had actually looked forward to detention.
"Three, two, one…" I counted silently.
DING! The bell went off. I practically leapt out of my seat, grabbed all of my stuff, and ran out the door, much to the surprise of everyone else in the class. I didn't care, though. How often is it that you get to spend time with a person from a video game?
I saw Uriko in the hallway; she must have been looking for the room we had detention in.
"It's in room 202; the auditorium." I said as I approached her.
"Oh, thanks." She said.
"Just follow me. It's not that hard to find."
What followed was the most awkward two minutes of my life. That was, until we got to detention and took our seats. As soon as we sat down a teacher walked in and banged a ruler on the desk; Mr. Hatherton. He taught U.S. History to the freshmen and was also known as the shortest fuse in the entire school. His face was horribly out of proportion with the rest of his head; his eyes were small, his nose was small, hell even his ears were small. To top it off he had thin, white hair that looked like it was piled on top of his head.
"Alright you punk-ass kids!" He was almost shouting all the time. "No bullshit today! No paper airplanes, no talking, no faking a seizure to get out early, NO NOTHING!"
The room was dead quiet for about five minutes. Uriko was sitting two seats away from me; it was a rule that people had to sit every other seat. They started that to catch people writing notes to each other. People always found ways around that, though.
I took out a piece of paper and started writing a note to Uriko:
Is it me or does he sound like Mr. Garrison from South Park with a bug up his ass?
I pushed the note off the edge of the crappy desk that was built in to the chair and kicked it to Uriko; the row of chairs in front of us blocked it from Mr. Hatherton's view. Uriko read the note and began writing another one. She dropped it on the floor and kicked it over to me. It said:
I don't watch tv.
I simply tore off a small piece of paper and wrote a very quick message back:
Oh.
We spent about half an hour in detention just writing back and forth to each other. The one downfall to this plan was that there was now a slowly growing stack of paper near both of our seats; not big enough for the teacher to see, but still pretty big. One note in particular I thought I could handle well, mostly because it was about a math problem:
How do you integrate X^3+X+2?
I spent a good five minutes trying to explain it to her until I finally gave up and wrote a message to her saying:
It's magic.
I saw her smirk out of the corner of my eye, but I also saw Mr. Hatherton glance at his watch.
"Okay you living piles of cow shit! Get the hell out!" He said as he grabbed his suitcase and walked out. I packed all my stuff up, including the notes Uriko had passed to me. Uriko did the same with mine.
"Where is your car parked?" She asked as we walked out the door.
"Just turn right and go out the doors." I said.
Another five inches of snow was on the ground. I almost slipped and fell heading down the stairs to the parking lot, but I caught myself on the handrail. Uriko laughed lightly at me. All I could do was smile like an idiot as I gradually regained my balance. It was then that Uriko looked at me with a strange look.
"Why aren't you wearing a jacket?" She asked. "It's freezing out here."
"I love cold weather." I told her. "I've gotten used to it over the years. The only time I DO wear a jacket is when it dips below ten degrees Farenheit or when it's raining."
"I…see…where is your car?"
"It's that big white blob in the corner." I said, pointing to a massive white blob that was a pale blue color in spots. I unlocked the doors so Uriko could get in and grabbed a snowbrush out of the back seat. "This may take a while."
The snow was wet, too, so it was sticking together as I tried to brush it off. Eventually I just started using the brush as a baseball bat and smacked a lot of huge chunks of snow off of the windows and the windshield. After that came the sheet of ice that had formed below it. I sighed heavily and started scraping. When I got enough of the ice off of the windshield that I'd be able to drive I saw Uriko in the passenger seat and waved at her. Nice one, idiot, I thought to myself. After another five minutes of scraping I got the ice off of the car, hopped in the driver's seat, started the car up, and headed for the exit.
"Where exactly do you live?"
"Make a left."
It started snowing again, so hard in fact that I was having some trouble seeing more than ten feet in front of me. Uriko, apparently, could see just fine.
"Turn right here." She said.
As I turned I could faintly see a sign by the street: Topaz Parkway. It was a new development that only had a few houses out and for sale, but I didn't think anyone had gotten a house there yet.
"It's the next driveway on your left." Uriko told me.
Uriko had one hell of a house; at least it looked that way from the outside. The whole house was made of brick and suspended over the porch by two large pillars was another room with a large circular window divided into six pieces by a window pane.
I parked the car and watched Uriko get out of the car.
"See you tomorrow." She said as she closed the door. I smiled and nodded, being the idiot that I am, and threw the car in reverse, only to be greeted by the sound of my car battery dieing.
"SHIT!" I screamed as I pounded my fist on the steering wheel several times until I heard someone knocking on the driver-side window. It was Uriko. I got out of the car and was greeted by a blast of snow right in the face from the blizzard.
"Need a hand?" Uriko asked.
"My battery died." I told her, wiping the snow off my glasses as best I could. "Can anyone here give me a jump start?"
"I think Alice could." She said as she waved me into the front door of the house.
"Alice, too? How much did that book do?" I said quietly as I approached her house.
"What was that?"
"Oh, nothing. I'm just thinking about my physics assignment."
"Oh…well, you can stay in the living room for a bit if you want. Just take your shoes off here so you don't get the carpet wet."
"If I want? What else am I going to do?"
"I don't know, just wait while I get Alice." Uriko ran up a nearby flight of stairs.
Her house was really nice. Pretty much every room was painted beige. The family room consisted of a pair of sofas placed near a red brick fireplace. There were a couple coffee tables near the sofas literally covered in magazines.
"Hey Scott!" Uriko screamed from the top of the stairs down the hall. "Alice is going to help jump-start your car!"
Only moments after she said that Alice was at the bottom of the stairs. Like Uriko she looked exactly like her Primal Fury counter part. In fact only Kenji looked different; he was in his alternate costume, or as I call it the Bruce Lee look.
"Are you going to just sit there or are you going to come and help?" Alice's voice echoed through the hallway to me. I quickly got up and half-jogged down the hall.
"Just let me get my shoes on." I said.
I tied my shoes and followed Alice through a side door that lead into the garage where a silver, strange looking car was sitting. I would've said it was one of those Subaru Outbacks, but there was no make or model indication anywhere on the car. Hell, it didn't even have license plates!
"Do you have a set of jumper cables?" Alice asked me.
"Yeah, I'll go get them."
As I walked out to my car Alice pulled her car out so it was facing mine. In a matter of minutes she was able to jump-start the battery.
"Thanks for the assist." I told Alice. I saw Uriko standing in the garage. "See you tomorrow, Uriko!" I shouted.
"Where the hell were you!?" The first words out of my mom's mouth; how nice. "I was worried sick!"
"I was giving someone a ride home and my car battery died," I explained to her, "But I got it jump-started so I'm okay now."
"What do you mean someone?"
"Just a girl."
A huge grin spread across my mom's face. "Ooooooo, you have a girlfriend?"
"No, she just needed a ride home."
"Alright, you just keep telling yourself that." She walked off to the family room to catch one of those lame talk shows.
"Damn parents." I muttered as I walked into my room and tossed my bookbag on the bed. I needed to work off some tension, so I naturally turned on Bloody Roar: Primal Fury. I skipped the intro and went straight to the fights and received a huge shock.
Not only were the characters alive and kicking, they were actually ripped out of the game itself! There were large blank boxes where Uriko, Kenji, and Alice were supposed to be. What concerned me, though, was that I could see another empty box in the screen. I cycled through the characters to see who it was and sat silent for a moment.
"Oh shit…" I whispered to myself, "It's Stun…"