El Sptihor Vulthus (In the Belly of the Beast)

Chapter Three

"Mom, uh…is this a joke?" I asked.

"No, sweetheart. Cacti are actually tasty to Cadowights."

Nora walked over to the table and looked Mom in the eye. "Mother, we are not Cadowights now; we're human. And the human tongue is not fit for anything prickly."

"Oh, come on. Humans just think they can't eat this stuff. I'll prove it to you." She stuck a fork in the piece of cactus that was in her bowl. Then she brought it to her lips and took a big bite. "Ow!" she shouted, running to the bathroom. Half an hour later I walked pass the bathroom door and heard Mom's reflection giving her instructions on where to direct the tweezers to pull needles out of her tongue.

I went back to reading Lust for Magic until it was time for bed. I dreamt a giant spider chased me into a lion's den. When I awoke, I thought how odd it was that I had a dream of Earthian animals; on Pacifico, we had nothing like spiders or lions. I missed my pet zangerbang, which was yellow and scaly, had a hump on its back and a tail about six feet high that was always in the air. Zangerbang racing was common in my old neighborhood. My zangerbang, Mozzie, won second place in a race during my tenth year. Ah, those were the days…

After eating a breakfast of peanut butter on Eggo waffles, I waited for the bus to come. When it arrived, I hopped on and sat down next to a boy named Spazz, since Jared had a different route.

Spazz was playing a game on a Nintendo DS. I looked over his shoulder. There were some strange creatures doing battle. I stared. One of them looked like a fooliwant.

"Hey, where'd you find a game with a Pacificoran animal on it?"

Spazz gave me a funny look. "Pacificoran? Does that refer to some kind of game that hasn't been released yet? I'll store it in my photographic memory and google it later."

I slapped my forehead. Of course there'd be nothing Pacificoran in an Earthian video game. But I needed to correct my error. "What is that?"

"You've never played Pokemon before? You're weird. See, I'm using this wolf critter called Lucario…he's Psychic and Steel type. But if you don't know anything about Pokemon, that won't make sense to you. And this thing I'm fighting is called Mamoswine."

"It's not…a fooliwant, then?"

"A fooliwhat? Nah. Gosh, you must play obscure games. Video games are my life, and I never heard of a fooliwant."

He went back to his game. I saw the creature that looked like a fooliwant disappear from the screen, and the words, "MAMOSWINE fainted," below it. Then a little round red object appeared, and out of it popped another creature, and at the bottom of the screen were the words, "Kiria sent out LANTURN."

"Nice graphics," I said, though I had little idea what "graphics" were. It was just something a character in a comic book said to a video game designer.

"You really ought to play this game. It's a lot of fun. Next year, Pokemon Bronze and Iron are coming out. I'm hoping Dunsparce gets an evolution."

I had no idea what "Dunsparce" was, nor did I understand the term "evolution." I pulled an Ironman comic out of my backpack. It was the very first Ironman comic, made in July 2009. The two films had preceeded it. Ironman 3 was due to come out in 2011.

I had gotten halfway through the comic when we arrived at school. I stuffed it into my backpack and climbed off the bus.

After going through the metal detectors, I walked over to the spot where Jared was waiting. A year ago, I had thought how funny it was that if I had retained my horns when I became human, I would be unable to get through the metal detector safely. Sure, my horns were made of a metal not found on Earth (Mom told me six months ago), but the metal detectors would still recognize them, because they had similarities to Earthian metals.

"Was Marcia any help?" I asked when I reached Jared.

"No. She thought 'War of 1812' was a candy bar."

I laughed, and Jared laughed too. Of course, I didn't know that much about candy here: only last week I learned about 5th Avenue. Personally, I preferred a Milky Way. Nora liked Snickers.

"I hope Ms. Igo doesn't try to teach us trigonometry again," Jared said lamentably. "I don't think we're supposed to learn that until tenth grade."

"'Trig' is short for 'trigonometry', isn't it?"

"Yes. Geez, Sherri, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out."

"Well, I was just thinking that my sister Nora is in eleventh grade, and she's taking Trig. I wasn't sure you were talking about the same thing."

"Sherri, you could rival Marcia for a lack of brains. Also, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't bring Nora into every conversation we have. It's annoying." Jared got up and went toward his first period, Physical Education.

I didn't follow him, because my first class was on the opposite side of the building, and I had three minutes to get there. I made it just in time.

Mrs. Holcrust taught General Science for both seventh and eighth graders. She always had her parrot, Imicross, in the room. Before I began seventh grade, I didn't know there were such things as talking birds. Imicross startled me on that first day, so much so that I fainted and spent most of the day in the nurse's office. But I was used to it now.

"Okay, class, today we'll be learning about fungi."

"You mean me?" asked a boy who sat two rows away from me. "I'm a fun guy."

"No, no, Ralph. I mean the phylum which mushrooms and mildews fall under."

"Aren't mushrooms plants?" a girl in front of me wanted to know.

"No, Fungi and Plantae are two different Phyla," said Mrs. Holcrust. "Fungi are defined by the following characteristics. They each have…"

I stopped listening. I had yet to come across a comic book character who had even the slightest interest in science. Even the villains who were scientists didn't care about science at all, only taking over the world. And I labeled anything comic book characters didn't care about "N.M.C.," not my concern. Thankfully, Mom did not care about my low grades in science courses. She said that was to be expected of me, since the scientific facts of planet Pacifico were tremendously different from those of planet Earth. (Mom overlooked the fact that Nora had no trouble in her science classes and she obviously was expected to know stuff I didn't. But Mom's mind worked that way; just because one Cadowight-turned-human can learn scientific principles like the back of her own hand, doesn't mean all Cadowight-turned-humans can. That's one thing I love about my mom.)

Midway through class, I heard Imicross saying, "Detention for Sherri Malice! Detention for Sherri Malice!"

I looked up at the parrot, then turned to Mrs. Holcrust, who was glaring at me. "What? I didn't do anything."

"That's precisely the problem, Miss Malice. You were woolgathering, and when I asked you to kindly repeat the parts of the mushroom, you didn't hear me. I asked you three times. Because of this, even though I don't want to, I must give you a detention slip." She motioned me to approach her desk. I did, and she handed me the slip. It was pink with a black skull in the background. At the bottom of the slip, three capital blue letters stood out: SAC. I turned to Mrs. Holcrust's face, and was astonished to discover that she seemed very happy indeed to have given the slip to me, contrary to what she had said.

I resumed my seat. The rest of the day went by in a haze. I turned my unfinished history homework in to Mr. Aryoung, and failed his pop quiz. I handed my log journal of what I read in Lust For Magic to Ms. Ukulele. I think Ms. Igo tried to teach us how to divide tangent by cosine, whatever those are, until someone in the class pointed out that we were supposed to be learning about converting fractions into percentages. Of course, Earthian math makes no sense to me; only duck mathematics does. (By the way, the "duck" in the title "duck mathematics" has nothing to with the avian species that inhabits Earth's lakes, for obviously there are no ducks on the planet Pacifico. Actually, a "duck" to Cadowights is more like a warehouse. We use duck mathematics to figure out the measurements of a proper warehouse, a selling warehouse, a diving warehouse, a sinking warehouse, a shrinking warehouse, an oblong warehouse, an abstruse warehouse…the list goes on an on.)

By the end of the day I was bum-beat. I wanted to go home and read a few Killer Hamster comics to get these stupid facts teachers had been trying to drill into my head all day. But in my last class, Home Ec., Nichole Anderson caught sight of my pink slip. She smiled sweetly at me and said, "I'll escort you to the SAC room, little Sherri." Nichole was five-feet tall, I four and and a half.

I berated myself silently for not having thrown away my detention slip earlier. Sure, I'd be in deeper trouble the next day, but at least that afternoon I would be free for some fun with Alfic. But I had to follow Nichole to the SAC room, or I'd be in trouble so deep that it could fill the Eesymorian Ocean, which Mom tells me is as big as the planet Earth itself.

Nichole opened the door to the SAC room and peered in. "Oh, Mr. Vortex, I found a girl with a pink slip. Shall I bring her in?"

"Please do."

Nichole dug her long fingernails into my arm as she dragged me inside. "Give Mr. Vortex your pink slip!" she barked. I obeyed, wincing from the pain in my arm.

"Yes," said Mr. Vortex. "Have a seat. You may go, Miss Anderson."

Nichole gave me a falsely sweet smile as she released my arm and hurried out of the room. A couple of boys entered, and each handed Mr. Vortex their detention slips. Then three girls came in and did the same. After a few more minutes, nobody new arrived. Mr. Vortex went over to the door and locked it. Then he said, in a low voice, so that most of the others had to strain to hear it (though not me, since I still retained my Cadowight senses), "Partner up quickly. Each pair will be going to a different dimension, where you will be forced to face a test. Not those pathetic pen-and-paper tests you're used to. No, you will be given a practical examination, with what I call real value. The only trouble is, you may not survive."