Authors Note: Yay for chapter! Actually, it was already written, but I forgot to upload it.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
I glanced at the clock from my perch in the corner. It was my own "Get-your-ass-out-of-bed" alarm clock; it was my first invention. It got progressively louder until you unplugged it. Nothing like looking for a cord every morning. Always good from some exercise.
I sighed and began to search for the cord to unplug the clock. The clock sighed its last irritating beep as I unplugged it. I took a deep breath; I was alive. Nothing has happened. I felt silly for staying up all night, crushed against a corner, pointing my meager dagger at any air that looked suspicious. I cracked my neck. The truth dawned on me like a pile of bricks, falling on an unsuspecting victim.
Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened. Nothing had happened.
How quirky it was that last night, nothing had happened?. Nothing had god-damned happened! A metaphorical dunce hat fell on my head. I felt played like a bad piano. I. Felt. Like. A. Fool. I glanced at the small pocket knife still clenched in my right hand.
I laughed. It was a sort of crazy laugh: the laugh of a lunatic who didn't get enough sleep. Lack of sleep does crazy things to crazy people.
I got up and stretched. Today was going to be a good day. How can I say that after thinking I was going to die the night before? Well, I didn't die. That in my book equals a good day.
I yawned and my eyes fell onto my desk. My eyes fell upon the luminol, and the dried blood, and paper. The vial of luminol was empty, the blood had mixed into it, and the paper had absorbed the mixture. I chuckled. Yes, fear and sleep-deprivation had gotten to me.
And I realized two things at that moment.
One, I was being chased by a man as crazy as myself.
Two, if he thought I wasn't going to catch him first, he was severely mistaken.
I proceeded to push the liquid mass into my trash can. My hands turned a blood red. I smiled an eerie half smile. The smile of a person whose train had left sanity-ville.
You see, I pride myself on my calm, impartial mental demeanor. The outside emotions are just for show, but when something causes me to lose my calculating mental demeanor, I get very angry, even if I don't show it. I then react with a due and just response.
Yeah, just. Even if my idea of justice isn't like other's.
I proceeded to enter my bathroom and prepare myself for the day. Upon exiting, I went downstairs. I checked to my left and to my right before entering the kitchen. I wasn't a big fan of social confrontations in the morning.
I picked up my backpack and exited the house. Upon opening the door, I found a crumpled up piece of paper. Probably another letter from , as I affectionately decided to name him. I chucked. What a weird person I am. I picked it up casually as if it were a letter from a best friend.
I opened it as I was walking to school.
It read:
"See you at the lunch table."
I snickered. Then smiled. Then laughed uncontrollably; I buckled in laughter. That kind of shit didn't scare me. Don't remind me about last night. That never happened.
"Well, , I'll see you there as well," I responded to myself.
I began walking again with a smile on my lips. If he wanted to play, then we would play.
There were twelve people at my lunch table, including me. The creator of the tables apparently never took 4th grade; he or she chose the tables to be square with 3 people per side and a large plain of space in the middle. Hell, you might as well just paint "USELESS SPACE HERE" all over the center of the table. A potato could have done a better job.
Oh no, now I'm rambling again; back on subject, Kairi!
After returning from my mental diatribe, I cracked my neck and continued to glance over the letter's contents, looking for hidden material, a hidden message perhaps. I found none.
This person was obviously underestimating me if he was going to give me such a crucial piece of information. Assuming it wasn't a lie, with only eleven people to choose from, I had a 9% chance of just guessing him at random.
Funny. I didn't care that he was threatening my life. I just wanted a challenge. I guess that's what all geniuses want: a challenge suitable for their abilities. And I sure as hell wasn't expecting him to give it to me.
How wrong I was.
I arrived at the school at 8:30, thirty minutes before school started, fifteen minutes before they would let us into the building. It was an old-fashioned school, one story high, with a courtyard in the front.
I saw Sora standing near the front door. He jogged up to me to visit with me, smiling and bouncing as he approached.
Now, if I had to confide this whole debacle to one person, it would probably be Sora. But did I plan on telling him? No, it would ruin my mentally-twisted idea of fun.
Now, you may ask why I called Selphie that night instead of Sora when I was fearing for my life. Well, people do crazy things when they're scared.
Overall, I love Selphie with all my heart, but, let's be honest here, she can't keep a secret to save her life. Or mine.
Sora hugged me. No, he wasn't sexually harassing me; rather, he was just a very affectionate individual.
"Kairi, how have you been?" He was still hugging me. This guy really needs to learn about "social acceptability".
I broke the hug by stepping back and smiled at him. "I've almost died from excitement waiting for the weekend to end," I responded sarcastically. Well, the first part about almost dying wasn't completely false.
Sora laughed while characteristically rubbing the back of his head with his hand. Then our conversation degenerated into an awkward silence.
I'm not a very social person as you can tell. I tend to store all my social skills where I store my chemicals: locked in a safe.
Clouds began to blow in from the east and the subtle breeze transformed into a sizable gust. One could measure the power of the wind by just observing how it affected the physical entropy* and random movement of Sora's hair.
Cute.
The bell rang. "Well I guess I'll see you at lunch, Kairi," Sora said to brake the silence. He then proceeded to ditch me and walk into the building.
What a ladies man.
The halls were crowded; individual voices merged together to form a loud, unintelligible background noise. My locker was where it always was, halfway between the boys bathroom and a water fountain.
But my locker had something on it, a small note. I smiled in anticipation. If it was was I thought it was, this guy was making it too easy.
And that it was: a note from the stalker.
They will be like the enemy's gate.
Love,
"Mr. Stalker"
The knowledge that he had to have been following me to school to hear me call him Mr. Stalker seemed trivial. What the hell was the enemy's gate? More importantly, how would "they" be like "the enemy's gate"?
Ah, who cares, he was already as good as found. The security cameras around the school created 30 minute video clips then used a network to **ftp them to a central server. Not even an hours worth of mysql injection would be needed to obtain the administrator password and view the clips, which were named by time and date.
How did I know this? Don't ask. It's none of your business anyway.
This guy must have been pretty arrogant. He was as good as mine.
At least, that's what I thought.
Lunch arrived without further incident. No letters were left on my chairs or anything of the sort.
I looked around the table, everything seemed normal. To my right was Selphie, to her right was Riku, and continuing to the right were Olette, Hayner, Pence, Axel, Roxas, Namine, Aeris, Xion, and Sora in that order. The chain ended with Sora being at my left.
I didn't get lunch. I spent the entire period watching others, having others watch me, and analyzing the situation, including the seating pattern, which I found particularly interesting.
Why had I sat next to Selphie and Sora? Because they were my best friends.
Why had Hayner sat between Olette and Pence? Because he was dating Olette and he was best friends with Pence.
It appeared that the seating arrangement was constructed loosely by the relationships between the occupants. Furthermore, I noticed that the two males sitting across from me, Roxas and Axel, were tending to look at me a lot more than the other occupants of the table. Maybe I was just being paranoid. Either way, I decided to file both pieces of information away in my memory banks.
Overall, nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the conversations. Axel and Roxas were discussing the ideal size of knockers (I hope that wasn't the reason that they were looking at me), while Olette and Hayner were planning a date for the upcoming weekend.
"Kairi, is there something wrong?" Selphie inquired. Most likely she had noticed the bags underneath my eyes, or my constant scratching at my arm, or maybe the death glare aimed at the general vicinity of our table.
"Never been better," I responded without taking my eyes off the people situated at the table.
"Oh, well you called me last night and all I heard was 'Yes, it's Kairi' then you hung up," she retorted.
Shit. "Oh, I was just wondering if we had math homework, but then I found my planner," I lied. Hopefully she wouldn't notice that I seemed to never forget anything.
"Oh, ok."
And then lunch ended.
As I had expected, it was no problem getting into the server. It ends up there was an exploit available in the website our school runs in order to allow us to check our grades online.
The both the administrator and the root password were: rainbowfish123. All lower-case. No extraneous symbols. Just rainbowfish123.
What. The. Hell. This is why I don't have faith in people; they have terrible judgment. All the private information you could every want: grades, social security numbers, etc was guarded by a password a preschooler could guess.
Typical.
I then surfed to the folder .securtapes and attempted to open it. Password-protected. How cute. Anyone with a brain wouldn't put the root password as the password to a miscellaneous directory.
Now let's see how much faith I have in people.
I typed in: rainbowfish123. It opened. Yup, I have no faith in people.
I sifted through the files and found the video file for "Camera 7" for today for the thirty minutes before I came upon the note. I opened it and watched.
Fifteen minutes in, the note was still not on my locker. The only people I had seen passing by were janitors.
Suddenly, the video went black. A black background and white text appeared on the screen.
It read:
"You can't cheat in a feeble attempt to save yourself, Kairi~"
Then the video returned and the note was on my locker. I re-winded the video footage again. And again. And again. He had overwritten the part with him placing the note on my locker.
Not only was he able to download the video and edit it, he was able to change the permissions to 777 to allow him to overwrite the previous video tape.
I don't think I've ever laughed so hard in my life. I took the pocketknife next to my desk and opened it. I stabbed the stack of printer paper next to my computer dozens of times. The laughter eventually degraded into a smile.
Shit's getting interesting.
I checked the access logs in an attempt to find his IP. They were wiped. I re-wiped them and leaned back in my chair.
I thought back to the note.
They will be like the enemy's gate.
Love,
"Mr. Stalker"
I regained my posture and began to search for the phrase, "Enemy's Gate", in several search engines. I eventually found a quote that used the term in the form of "The enemy's gate is down". Could the "they" in the message be referring to the servers or the video files? I was unsure.
The genius' despised "Unknown X" was rearing its head again. Was the message supposed to relate to the servers or could it relate to something more sinister?
I once again leaned back in my seat and then proceeded to rub my chin in a quizzical fashion.
This was going to be interesting.
Suddenly, later in the night, my instant messenger's window popped up. I had received a message from a user not on my friends list. It was asking for confirmation
Username: . 1 Message waiting. Would you like to accept this message?
Very interesting indeed.
I accepted the message.
*entropy- used to refer to the randomness of system in this scenario.
**ftp – file transfer protocol – used to move files over networks.
Author's Note: I hate Ender's Game.