Ruby Rose uncovered her eyes and spun to face the other way, but her school's playground revealed none of her classmates. "Ready or not, here I come!"
A whistle blared from the playground's corner where her teacher, wearing a blue overcoat and jeans, leaned forward from one of the benches. "You gave yourself away in the first second. Everyone knows where you're starting now." The adult white trans-woman replaced her whistle with a stopwatch, both of which dangled from a lanyard around her neck. She whirled her finger in a circle, telling Ruby to turn her back and restart.
Five more minutes passed in blindness.
Ruby bounced in place like kinetic energy pumped out of her heart, filled her veins, but had nowhere to escape. It fueled her to bursting.
The stopwatch counted three hundred seconds of her precious time, dragging as slowly as three hundred years, until it beep!-beep!-beep!ed and unleashed her on the playground.
She stirred mulch under her training shoes, her hair and arms twirled once again, and she raced through the temperate sunshine of that mid-Fall morning.
The right angle of daylight caught her silver eyes.
Once she reached the western playground, she circled a lemon-yellow slide built like a tunnel that corkscrewed twice before it touched the ground. "Mission control, I've found the first Grimm."
A girl squealed. Several shadows of kids' hands and feet were pressed on the slide from within, even while Ruby climbed up through the bottom.
Ruby's voice filtered like all of them were trapped in a plastic chamber. "You're dead; I win!" A girl's shoes scrambled out of view toward the top while a mix of three different voices hurried each other.
A little bit later, the class-mates accepted defeat and returned to their teacher, while the Hunter moved on with her search.
Some ways away, Ruby crawled hands and knees under the southern playground where a lattice of rope hung between the mulch ground and an elevated walkway. "Found you, Percy."
Percy's back faced her at first. His skin resembled the color of ivory, and he wore wire-rimmed glasses with a bone-white tunic that probably used to be a pillowcase. He removed his black hood while raising both hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, you win."
Five acres of arboretum, grassy landscape, and four unique wood-log playgrounds surrounded Ruby further than she could see. Patch oaks towered thirty feet tall and filtered sunlight through their canopies. Pink and baby blue meadows unfurled their fragrance and fattened their bumblebees. Red-orange and pearl-white koi fish lived in a pond somewhere out of view.
The whole setting resembled an enormous cross, fenced in on all sides with iron trelliswork.
She could spend her whole school day on the grounds, but she wouldn't discover all this place had to offer.
Class-time gave her an hour.
Tuesday mornings between 10:30 and 12:00 noon, Summer and Winter Court played Search and Destroy.
For several Tuesdays since school began, their teacher drew a random student's name from a hat, and that student pretended to be a Hunter. Everyone else picked black hoods or white masks and had five minutes to hide throughout the playgrounds. They got more minutes if the Hunter did something wrong.
Once the Hunter found all her class-mates or the hour ended, it was time to return indoors.
This was Ruby's first chance to be a Hunter, and thirteen kids her age pretended to be Grimm hiding somewhere in the five acres.
Her sports clothes were all white and made of breathable cotton, but the symbol of a hot-pink caduceus displayed on her back and the left side of her chest, both of which were surrounded with spirals. A few echoes of dirt and grass remained on her clothes, especially around the soles of her white shoes, formed during playground romps in the past.
Blue hydrangea bushes shifted nearby.
"You won't get away from me!" Ruby leapt that way at the same time as a class-mate screamed.
The shrubs scuffed together. Footsteps diminished.
Once Ruby vaulted around the blue bulbs and green leaves, her class-mate was gone, but she threatened them at the top of her lungs, "I am the best Hunter in Remnant. No Grimm will escape me."
"Not if I stop you." The voice from ahead of her, rugged and dense like it was made of gravel, stunned Ruby in place. It wouldn't normally, but she was too deep in this game of pretend.
Ruby was too in-character to let it go. She emphasized how stunned the voice made her feel by shivering her fingers and stuttering. "Y-y-you trapped me."
"It was too easy!" Oni Arith spread their stance in a clearing of grass until they squatted. They punched a few times, thrusting from their sides and striking the same spot in the air. "Hya-ha-yah." The nonbinary child jerked their chin up with their teeth exposed, expressing something between a snarl and a grin. A yellow bandana and a hairband kept waves of espresso-dark hair out of their face. The rest of their abyssal black outfit resembled a true Grimm's hide.
A butterfly as small as the palm of a baby's hand pranced midway between them until it landed on a stem of grass. Its wings folded into one.
Twenty feet of field separated the children.
Stillness formed a globe around them.
Ruby said, "You think you can defeat me? I am Summer Rose, slayer of all monsters."
Oni over-exaggerated every word. "The only monster I see is you."
The butterfly darted away. Birds from all over scattered to the winds, once Ruby's battle-cry disturbed the woodland air and her sprint shook the ground. She pumped as fast as her little arms could go, hollering the whole way at her pretend enemy.
Oni fled, but Ruby stayed on their heels.
Where their shoes landed, she pursued.
Their screams combined into a drawn out howl, until moments later when Oni's transformed into cackling.
The race circled over turf and root. Branches skimmed overhead and patches of sunlight missed them both. Round and round like a carousel, the children didn't stop.
"That's right, keep chasing me." Oni bounded with legs too long, too developed in the calves and thighs for a six-year-old. "You'll never catch up."
"I win; you're dead." Ruby ignored any other students for all that time. She made up for her stride with fleet feet speeding above the ground. She reached out any moment she came close but grazed inches away from Oni's belt. "I win; you're dead!"
Oni remained untouched, even when they slowed down in view of their teacher.
Oni chortled on their way to sit down in the playground's corner with the other class-mates who were already found, even though Oni had fled Ruby for fifteen minutes.
Once they high-fived each other, Oni dropped all their weight onto the soft mulch ground.
Ruby toiled the other way, sweatier and dirtier than when she began. She braced both hands on her knees several steps along, where she panted and grunted. "Ready or not, here I come…."
The teacher said, "Thirty-seven minutes left."
"That's like forever."
"And you wasted all that energy to get one." She wagged the stopwatch at Ruby. "There's eight more out there."
The hour ended before Ruby found all of them, so the teacher summoned everyone with a final blast of her whistle and led them indoors.
The two friends walked side-by-side, a whole head of height difference between both children, but pressure amplified as if something more potent existed other than a couple feet of space. It was an unseen disturbance. Conversation rambled from the other class-mates and their friends, like no one else perceived it, but it swelled against Ruby and Oni's sides.
Oni broke the silence, first, by clearing their throat. "You're not mad, are you?"
Ruby crossed her arms, but she slumped just as quickly, all her pomp and authority deflated. "I am so mad. I was supposed to catch you. You're supposed to let me catch you, but you kept running away. That makes me so mad, you have no idea."
The words sounded correct. She should've felt upset, right? She'd lost—it wasn't her first time, since family games always found her in last place—but this was different. There was another word for it.
Oni defeated her.
Ruby wanted to be mad.
The hollowness in her wanted to be filled with an honest anger.
Instead, it left her vacant, where everything she said a moment ago didn't fit right and it all sounded wrong. She felt like walking twigs, one blow from toppling, for nothing inside was holding her together.
Was this sadness? Ruby let her arms go.
"I'm sorry, Princess. It's okay to be mad." Oni swallowed something and tilted their chin higher. "Next time, both of us will do better."