Enjoy the chapter, and I hope you remember to review!

It was cool to write the Christmas part during the holiday season. Christianity is not my religion, but we still got a tree, and it is kind of nice to write next to it.

I want you guys to take a look at my newest Deviation on DeviantArt. It is simply the best thing ever. Seriously.

Thank you to Cosmicsafe74 for Seventy-Four, the OC introduced in this chapter.

Finally, WAAS is almost at 1,000 views. Yeah!

LUCAS'S POV

After my test, I was made to stay in the hospital wing until lunch. I might no longer be tethered to the IV, but I still felt like a caged lion. I'd gone here twice in as many days, and I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

After much begging on my part, I managed to persuade Dr. Howler to let me go for lunch. Given that I had not eaten breakfast that day, and only had a very small amount of dinner the previous night, I was extremely hungry. I didn't want to spend the rest of the day in the infirmary, and the food there probably sucked as well.

"You may go for lunch, Lucas. You may also go with your peers to other classes, but you have it on my orders that you will not participate in any of them. Just in case the medicine I gave you causes any problems, I don't want you going crazy during Engineering".

She then looked at me with those Bengal tiger eyes, and yet she looked somewhat motherly as she said this. As much as I resented my own mother at the moment, I just couldn't say no when she made that expression.

"Do you, Lucas Zantry Enfield, solemnly swear that you will not participate in Engineering or anything physical that you may have this afternoon?"

"Yes" I said. Anything to get out of the hospital wing.

"Very well, then" she said, switching to a rather crisper manner. "I'll let you go at lunchtime".

Dr. Howler was true to her word. I was released from the infirmary and made my way back downstairs, to the dining hall. There, I found my friends in the usual place, and we started having a little more conversation.

"How did the test go, Lucas?" Cole asked.

I snorted. "If I had really tested positive for POTS or something like that, do you really think I'd be having lunch with you right now?"

"So it came back negative?" Mike said.

"That's correct" I said, feeling a grin make its way onto my face. And really, I couldn't help it. It was such a relief to know that I was healthy, and able to eat lunch with everyone else. That in itself meant a lot to me.

The food came up, and it was another delicious-looking meal. Chicken wraps, orange and green, adorned the risen plates. There were also pitchers of water that looked like they had just been collected from one of the crystalline springs high up in the Cornerian mountains. Which, now that I thought about it, they probably were.

Sure enough, everything tasted great, exemplified even more so since I had been so hungry. The entire time, however, I kept glancing over at the door leading to the next class that we would be going to.

According to my schedule, it was Engineering. I would have to go with my classmates to the room, and yet not be able to participate. The very thought of it was terrible. Based on that alone, maybe I should have stayed with Dr. Howler for the rest of the day. It would have been far preferable. However, I also didn't want to draw more attention to myself than I already had.

I was very much dreading my next class, to say the least.

The Engineering room, which was located far below the dining hall, at least ten levels below, was definitely the least futuristic-looking place in the entire school that I had seen so far.

It looked like a blacksmith's shop from two hundred years ago, or at least what I imagined that would look like. Anvils hung on the walls, which were made of the same pine wood as the floor. An extremely hot oven lay to the side, and the instructor seemed to be busy baking something in it, because his back was turned to us. Clearly, this was one place that time had forgotten.

Except that this was only half the room. The other half looked like a very modern engineering classroom, with a white tiled floor and chalkboard on which various equations were written. Various machines were all over the place, and I could see now why Dr. Howler did not want me operating any of them so soon after such a major test.

Just as I had finished taking this all in, the instructor turned himself around. He seemed to be a large green frog, a little wide in the middle. He wore a beige labcoat and had large round eyes. His name tag read SLIPPY T.

"Hello, everyone" Slippy said to us. "I was just working on a project of my own here at the kiln. I'm sorry to keep you all waiting, I just lost track of time. I thought lunch ended fifteen minutes from now! But I had to turn off the kiln before I could talk to you safely, do you understand?"

Just about all of the class, including me, nodded.

"I have a note from Dr. Howler today that I think is worth reading to all of you. It says that one of my students, Lucas Enfield to be specific, is not allowed to participate today due to...health reasons".

Slippy didn't say outright what those "health reasons" were, but it was pretty obvious to just about everyone in the room that he was referring to the incident with the flight simulators yesterday. After all, a not insignificant percentage of the students in this class were also in my Flight Simulators group from yesterday.

Once Slippy was done with that, I noticed that every single student in the room had at least one eye on me. That was not something that I had been particularly prepared for, nor something that I welcomed now. I liked getting known by some people, but I rarely wanted to be the absolute center of attention. And now, that was what I was.

Eventually, after the class was briefed on more instructions for today's work, and they finally stopped staring at me, they got to work on their various projects. I tried to observe as much as possible, in order to gather what I would need to know in order to be able to work well in the Engineering class that I would have on the coming Wednesday.

For the most part, it looked like there would be a lot of math involved. Which, if you knew me, you would know that I have a genius-level math IQ, and would thus be able to get it easily. Hopefully, this would allow me to catch up with the rest of my class when it came time for me to enter Engineering after missing the first two lessons.

In conclusion, Engineering wasn't too bad. What came after it, however, was far worse.

My next class after Engineering was Flight Simulators. The same class I had passed out in only twenty-four hours before.

I was expecting to get some stares. I was expecting to be laughed at. I was expecting people to come over to me and say something to the effect of "Lucas! You're alive!"

I got all of those things and more. Cole and Will were not laughing at me. Instead, they stood right behind me, and they seemed to be flanking me like guards stationed right next to the throne of a prince.

To be honest, I kind of liked the change. In this analogy, I was the prince, and everyone else was laughing at me. Okay, maybe the last part of that analogy is not a happy one for me. But it was true, in a way.

I had to sit through Flight Simulators, watching other people go through the motions, including Will and Mike. None of the people who did it today were experiencing any problems with the simulators, which further cemented Dr. Howler's theory.

While it did answer a few questions, it raised even more. For instance, how was the machine sabotaged? Why was it only done for me, and not for anybody else?

These questions held no explanatory power, and would lead to even more. It boggled my mind just how crazy things were becoming. I never thought that my normally predictable small-town Maine life could have turned into this.

Throughout all of this, I sure got a lot of attention. Clearly, I was going to have a title, just like Harry Potter.

Lucas Enfield. The Boy Who Swooned. The thought of it would have made me laugh, if it was not for the fact that this was me.

After what felt like an eternity, but was of course just two hours, we went back to our dormitories for Shower Hour. I loved the feeling of the clean water on my skin, feeling it wash off the hospital smell that was so typical of the infirmary here. Even being here for only three days, I had gained an understanding of that.

Once that was over, we proceeded to dinner. During the conversation before the dishes rose up, I decided that I was going to field a few questions from Will, Mike, and Cole, wondering what they had to ask me.

"So...Lucas?" Will asked first.

"Yeah?"

"What did the test involve, exactly? I don't really know how all of this medical stuff works, and I would love to hear the story, if that's okay with you?"

I nodded. "Yeah, Will. It's fine. They basically just strap you into a bed, put an IV in your arm, and tilt the bed so that you pass out, which I thankfully didn't. There is nothing wrong with my heart, just the simulator. Does that answer your question?"

"Yes, it does" Will said, digging into the bowl of pasta that he had just made for himself, out of the Italian spread that had appeared before us. I noticed that, despite having such a great lunch, I was still very hungry. As a result of this, I took a big helping of the pasta, to which I added some lettuce and a roll.

As I had expected, it was as delicious as anything else had been here. It might have only been three days, but I knew that I could get used to this. The food, at least. Everything else was still going to be crazy, indeed likely to get crazier by the day.

I didn't want to ruin the deliciousness of the meal, but I knew that it was worth telling these people what Dr. Howler had told me. They had a right to know. They were my friends, after all, and this was something that they needed to and deserved to be aware of. Because, really, who knew? It might end up happening to them.

"Hey, guys", I said, "there's something that I need to tell you. Something important".

Mike, Will, and Cole were still too focused on their food, and I decided that the only way that I would get their attention would be if I said it out loud immediately, without warning.

"Dr. Howler, the one who performed the tilt-table test, thinks that someone deliberately tampered with the flight simulator, in order to make sure something happened. All signs from my test point towards that conclusion, she says".

Cole spat out a long length of spaghetti. "Say what?"

Will's eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, and I could tell that I had him now. This might have been the only way to get them to listen to me, but that didn't change the fact that I wished I didn't have to ruin dinner for them.

"That's right, and I wish it weren't the case".

"Maybe you shouldn't have been so surprised, Lucas" Mike said. "These things do happen, you know".

"If something was wrong with the simulator, Mike, don't you think that it would either have had to be fixed or else it would have happened again? Are you blind?" Cole all but shouted, but not quite loudly enough for the others in the hall to hear.

"I don't know" Mike said. "You just shouldn't be too surprised by these things. The machines go wrong all the time".

I didn't think anything was weird about what he was saying at the moment, but I would eventually.

Hours later, long after the stars had turned in the sky outside my window, I lay awake in bed, even after everyone else had gone to sleep.

Could it be Mike who had somehow been involved with the tampering? I mean, he couldn't be older than fifteen or sixteen, about the same age as the rest of us. What would have possessed him to do that? How would he have done that? And what basis did I have for even thinking that?

The fact was, he had been so dismissive of Dr. Howler's theory. And both of my other friends seemed to agree with her on that. So why didn't Mike?

It seemed so simple. Mike was the culprit, or at least affiliated with him or her. That was the explanation that worked the best, at least from my standpoint.

The thing was, I didn't know if it would be wise to confront him on it, or even imply that I suspected him, right yet. I needed to wait for the right moment.

When would it come?

WILLOW'S POV

I had never wanted to go to the Grey Clouds Flight Academy. I wanted to go to high school, keep up a good GPA, and maybe even become more than just friends with Lucas. I could have been more fortunate than I was right now.

Still, I always held out hope that there would be some day, some time, fairly soon, that I would get to meet with Lucas. We could have some alone time together, sit below the stars, and celebrate life and the fact that we had each other.

Unfortunately, it had not yet happened. And with every day that went by that I didn't get an opportunity like that, the less likely it seemed to happen.

My meeting with Lucas would have to wait, because time would not.

We continued to go through the days, which eventually turned into weeks. One day, I looked at the calendar and noticed that it was Christmas Eve. December 24 had rolled around, and, believe it or not, the holidays were observed here.

The previous week, trees had been put up in the dining hall, eight large pines chopped from the Cornerian wilderness. They were adorned with all kinds of ornaments, and it was definitely turning out to be one of the biggest Christmas celebrations, if not the biggest, that I had ever witnessed, let alone been a part of.

It is said that, during the Christmas season, more things are possible. I don't know if that is true or not, but the opportunity that I was anxiously awaiting finally arrived on that snowy afternoon.

The sun was already sinking behind the mountains, even though it was only 2:30 in the afternoon. It was definitely a beautiful sight to behold, and I was just glad that I had survived the last two flight simulations that I had been a part of.

Lucas had also been in two more flight simulations, and there had been no problems. I wished that I could have had a discussion with him, but that day came.

I saw him signing a sheet. He had written LUCAS ZANTRY ENFIELD on a slot for a "field trip" that the cadets would be allowed to go on.

"What is that?" I asked.

He turned around, and, noticing that it was me, smiled at me. "It's a trip up to the mountains. Apparently, intelligence is clarifying that there might be some kind of bomb in there. We don't want it going off and setting off an avalanche. Someone needs to go in to disarm it".

"Yeah, but why you? Why not someone else?"

"There are other people on the trip, Willow Foster. There will be twenty cadets there, including me. Cole has already signed up for the trip. Anything to stop the Anglar forces".

"But you're too new here to even think of such a thing, Lucas Enfield!" I all but yelled at him. I almost immediately regretted it. I didn't want to get in a shouting match with my boyfriend.

That made me think. What if he had stopped loving me over the last ten days during which we had not talked to each other very much at all?

"It's fine, Willow. Fox McCloud was only 18 when he saved the Lylat System from Andross. I'm going to help them, I want the experience. If I'm going to be a pilot someday, like Dr. Howler said-"

"Wait...Dr. Howler?" I asked. "When did you see a doctor?"

"Remember that day that I was absent from the morning classes? The day after I passed out in Flight Simulators?"

"Yes" I said, telling the truth.

"Well, I had to have a tilt-table test done on me, just to make sure that there was nothing wrong with my heart. It came back negative, so I do not need to have my legs amputated".

"Wait...amputated?"

"That's right, Willow. I might have needed a double amputation, but thankfully I don't, because my heart has no problem pumping blood to my brain normally. It was just because of the spinning of the simulator, which might have been sabotaged".

"I can't believe you kept this from me" I said.

Lucas didn't seem to want this to turn into a breakup fight. "When would I have told you? This is the first time we've been alone together for a week and a half".

It was true. I just couldn't believe that someone might have deliberately tried to seriously hurt or even kill Lucas by tampering with the flight simulator.

I looked in his eyes, something Lucas was sometimes not so great at doing, and I knew he was telling the truth. Sometimes, however, the truth was the very last thing that you wanted to believe.

At dinner the next day, which was Christmas, we didn't get any presents, nor had we gotten any that morning. It seemed that our parents had completely abandoned us by signing us away to this school. Which was fine with me, because I no longer wanted anything to do with them either.

Bill Grey made a speech before the feast of turkey, green beans, and mashed potatoes.

"I would like to congratulate everyone here for having made it through another year. As you all know, there is a trip that is on January 11 to the mountains, during which we will be defusing a bomb that our intelligence tells us has been planted in the mountains. We ourselves have little to worry about due to our protective shield, but we have an obligation to our fellow citizens of Corneria, as well as ourselves, to stop the inevitable avalanche that the bomb will cause. We suspect this is a plan being carried out by the Anglars.

"The twenty students on this trip, you know who you are, will report here at 9 AM, after breakfast, in order to travel by chopper to the glaciers on top of the mountains. Special safety precautions will be discussed for the next two weeks until this trip occurs".

I knew that Lucas's name was on that list. He had told me yesterday that he was going. I was surprised that they would let him, as well as Cole (who was similarly inexperienced), go on such a treacherous trip. I guessed that the Cornerian army was just looking for someone, and the more senior members just wouldn't cut it.

Based on all of this, it was a little difficult to enjoy the turkey and mashed potatoes, which were normally some of my favorite foods. What if, despite every safety precaution they took, Lucas might not return? Defusing a bomb buried under tons of snow and ice definitely sounded like something that was not risk-free by any means.

And yet, that was how things seemed to be going for me lately.

New Year's passed. And with that, 201X bled into 201Y just like that, and I had now been at this school for more than half a month. The days might be bleeding into each other, but I still got no closer to the end of what seemed like it might be an infinite set.

Starting on December 28, we had gone back to our normal classes, aside from the group that was going on the mountain trip. They did some more specialized training, and it seemed to be very difficult from the way I saw Nena, who was a member of that group, pant as she returned to the dining hall, and how much her appetite seemed to have increased since the trip had been announced.

One day, a few days into the new year, I returned from Flight Simulators, feeling as though I was finally starting to get the hang of it. I wasn't as skilled at video games as Lucas was, but I had managed to get in and get it done at last. I'd made it through the Sector Y level, the easiest difficulty that they let you do, without dying for a change.

Of course, Lucas had not reentered the simulation, or maybe he had. I didn't know what was going on in those specialized classes.

However, on this day, something happened that was unexpected.

We were all at dinner when Bill Grey announced, "I am pleased to say that we have a new student at this school".

The new student definitely did not look like a human. How could he, with the fact that his entire face was obscured by a massive gas mask with crimson eye holes? Not only that, but this new student's gas mask had a skull on it. He wore black boots and a black trenchcoat and trousers.

Tesla coils were going all over his backpack, looking like they were six feet tall. He himself was not unusually tall, at five feet, ten inches. Lucas was taller than that.

"Do you wish to introduce yourself, young man?" Katt asked. The purple feline was present for this ceremony, of showing the new student to his place.

The new guy shook his head.

"All right, then" Bill said. "This is Seventy-Four, and he seems to be very shy. He wouldn't show us his face, so there is that".

I looked at Seventy-Four. I guessed that he was about fifteen or sixteen, the same age as us, but that didn't explain the fact that he appeared so small even though he was average to above average in height-for-age. Certainly, he looked like a future pilot.

If the flight simulator had indeed been tampered with, it made sense that it might be someone like him. However, that made no sense at all. How could it have been the new guy, when he had only just come here more than two weeks after Lucas's collapse?

Not for the first time, I lay awake that night. There were just too many things that I was mulling over in my head for me to have any chance at getting a ticket to Dream Land anytime soon. Most of these concerned the new student, Seventy-Four. I just couldn't make myself believe that there was nothing fishy about him.

What if I snuck out at night? It's past midnight. The other girls are all asleep. No one will catch you if you try to do it.

I almost gasped. That thought had never come into my head before. But now it did, like someone had opened up my skull and put it there. Now, I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

I sat up in bed and swung my legs over the edge as quietly as possible. I didn't want to wake the others in my dorm room, so I tiptoed to the door and tried to open it making as little noise as I could.

It did work, and I sensed that none of the other girls had been awoken by it. This meant I was in the clear, although I still questioned why I had even decided to do this in the first place.

Maybe if I just go out here tonight, I'll meet up with Lucas.

That was just wishful thinking, and I knew it. Lucas would be sleeping in his bed like a good boy, and I was sneaking out of my dormitory in the middle of the night.

Right now, there was a very large difference between me and my boyfriend.

I went down the purple hallway and descended the spiral staircase that went past the statue of Falco Lombardi and Katt Monroe. It was only a few turns until I ended up in a more-used hallway by the male form.

In my pajamas, I made less noise, so I used that to my advantage to sneak through the various corridors of the school. Down another staircase, and through tunnels of green, and I reached a hallway that ended in the staff room. And, to my great surprise, I heard voices from behind that door.

"...simulator may have been tampered with" a voice said.

I realized that this voice belonged to Dr. Howler, the medical technician at the Grey Clouds Flight Academy. I had only heard her voice once or twice, but the voice of an anthropomorphic Bengal tiger was not something that you forgot easily.

"If it really does happen this easily, I might end up seeing a lot more cases like Lucas's" Dr. Howler continued.

"Indeed, I fear for the safety of everyone in this school" said another voice. That was Mrs. Hooter, the archery instructor. "I feel that there is a possibility that we may have a traitor in our midst".

"I mean, there is no way that anything like this could be an accident" replied Dr. Howler. "I tested Lucas on the table. Everything came back negative, even when I injected the drug into his IV. His heart is perfectly normal, so the simulator must have been abnormal".

The next voice was that of Falco Lombardi. "It's already pretty much been established that there was a problem with the simulator. I saw it go around and around like a washing machine on the spin cycle. Lucas would have hard a hard time staying conscious through that".

"Indeed" said Mrs. Hooter. "So do you think that there might be a traitor here? Who pretends to be helping us with our war effort, but is really helping the Anglars?"

Falco laughed, but it wasn't a happy one.

"I think that is likely, maybe seventy to eighty percent. The easiest explanation, for me, is that there is someone here who is going to go out of his way to try and harm Lucas. It's especially curious that nobody else has been affected by this glitch, and it has not affected Lucas on any subsequent times in the flight simulator. Could it have been a one-time thing, though?"

"I doubt it" Mrs. Hooter said.

Normally, I would have said that Mrs. Hooter was being her typical paranoid self. However, this time I happened to agree with her.

"What beef does this person have with Lucas? He's just a kid!" Dr. Howler cried.

"Easy, Dr. Howler" said Falco. "We don't know who this traitor is, and we don't want to point fingers unnecessarily. I might be a literal hawk, but I'm not a figurative one. I'm not just going to accuse people without reason to suspect them".

"That's right" Dr. Howler said, seeming to calm down. "I'm the doctor at this academy, and it is my job to make sure that the students stay safe. It doesn't really matter who the traitor is, as long as we make sure that Lucas Enfield is not endangered further".

I was still standing outside of the staff room, listening to all of this conversation, when the next words shocked me.

"I think that there might be someone outside of this room" Falco said.

"Me too" Mrs. Hooter said. I could sense her looking towards the door. She might have even been pointing a crossbow at it, and by extension at me.