Episode 3: In which Natsu and Lucy are both utter failures, and Erza is better than all of them tbh
Why Lucy had gotten herself into this, she had no idea. It started out as a favor for a classmate in one of her gen ed classes: create a poster to advertise the Peace in East Asia Club's annual event. Painting the background was no problem at all — Lucy knew exactly what she wanted to do and just did it — but the issue was the text (Lucy's handwriting was terrible) and the QR code the club wanted on there for whatever reason. So, Photoshop it was.
But Lucy was absolutely useless with Photoshop.
She had Natsu let her into the graphic design labs so she could use the nice computers there, but in the end she was just sitting there with the scan of her artwork open in front of her, not knowing what to do next. All these design-y people made it look so easy, but what did half these tools even do?
"Natsu?" she said.
He was sitting nearby on his laptop, feet propped on an empty chair. "Yeah?"
"How do I make a text box?"
"Just click the text tool."
"Where's that? Wait, is it the 'T' thing?"
"Yup. You can just hit 't' on your keyboard too; it's a shortcut."
"I already clicked it," Lucy said. She dragged out a text box and typed in the name of the event. She fiddled around with the font for a while, navigating the huge repertoire of typefaces the school had installed. But it wasn't long before she had another question.
"Uhh, Natsu?"
"Mm."
"What does this stuff mean? Crisp, strong, smooth…" It was an option on the text toolbar, but she'd never seen anything like it before.
"Oh, you can ignore that."
"It just doesn't seem to make much of a difference, so I'm confused about what it's for."
"There's a lot of little things like that in the Adobe programs," Natsu said. He didn't seem to be paying much attention, so maybe he didn't know what it was for either. These programs were so complicated.
"One more thing. How do I make it bolder?"
"There should be a drop-down menu right near where you selected the typeface," Natsu said. "You can pick the weight and italics and stuff there."
"Yeah, but it's not there."
That finally got Natsu to move. He leaned over to peer at Lucy's screen. She showed him the drop-down menu, which only had the option of "regular."
Natsu sighed. "That's a display font. There's no other variations. It's not made for body text like that, so what you see is what you get."
"So I can't make it bold? It's kind of hard to read."
"You can put a stroke on it."
"…what does that mean?"
Natsu sat up straight and removed the laptop from his lap. He stretched, cracking his knuckles over his head. "That's it," he said, "I'm teaching you Photoshop."
"No, you don't have to do that!" Lucy protested. It wasn't like this project of hers was for a class, and if she needed to she could just look up tutorials online.
"You taught me figure drawing, so now I'm going to teach you Photoshop!" Natsu insisted.
"Are you sure this is going to work?" Lucy said.
It's not that she didn't trust him to know what he was doing, but, well, she was a little worried about his teaching methods. The things he was good at came naturally to him, and he tended to be unable to explain it to people who weren't so gifted. He once tried to teach her how to shoot a basketball and failed miserably. "You just do the push thing with your wrist and it goes in the air and swoosh!" wasn't exactly helpful advice.
"Why wouldn't it work?" Natsu said.
"You're not always the best at teaching other people how to do things," she said.
"What makes you say that?"
"Remember when you tried to teach me basketball?"
"Yeah, that was a disaster. But hey, you know judo, so you don't even need to know basketball! It all works out."
"How is me doing judo even relevant here?"
"Anyway, graphic design isn't basketball. It'll be different."
"I hope you're right."
He wasn't right. As expected. After a lot of explaining, confusion, and more confusing explanations, Natsu declared Lucy a hopeless case.
For her part, Lucy was quite frankly exhausted by Natsu's excessive use of graphic designer jargon. She couldn't understand half of what he said. Every time he tried to explain something, he ended up having to give definitions for half his sentence, which only led to more jargon explanations. They went in circles like this for two hours before Lucy had to leave to get ready for work.
"How about you ask Gray?" Erza suggested when she and Lucy talked about it on the couch that night. Levy was brushing her teeth by the sink, listening in on Lucy's ranting.
"I can just look up tutorials online," Lucy said. "I think I've had enough of people trying to explain stuff to me."
"Yeah, but the tutorials are going to have a lot of information about things you don't need to know, which will waste your time. Just like what happened with Natsu," Levy said, her words somewhat muddled by the toothbrush in her mouth.
"I guess it can't hurt to ask," Lucy said. Her expression turned stern. "But if he starts talking about leading and kerning or corning or whatever, I'm out."
Erza snickered. "Corning?"
"I think it was actually called kerning," Lucy said.
"What is it?" Levy said.
"It's when you adjust the spacing between individual letters."
"See? You did learn something," Levy said.
"Yeah, I learned a lot of things that didn't tell me how to put words on this stupid poster. It was to the point where I was afraid to ask about how to do a QR code because that would mean another two hours of explaining useless stuff. And the QR code is the whole reason I'm doing this all on the computer in the first place."
"Definitely ask Gray," Erza said. "He helped me color-correct some photos of Jellal and I once. Took me about five minutes."
"With Natsu it'd've been more like five hours," Lucy groaned, and the other girls giggled. Really, she loved the kid to death, but he got way too carried away sometimes.
She did take Erza's advice to ask Gray. They met up the next afternoon between Gray's classes, and just like Erza said, he was an efficient teacher. He seemed to know exactly how to explain things in layman's terms, and suddenly Photoshop's overwhelming complexity didn't seem so overwhelming anymore. He made sure her scan was at print-quality resolution and everything, something she'd never have thought of on her own.
"You are a lifesaver," she said.
Gray chuckled. "Better than ol' Chili Pepper, huh?"
"When it comes to teaching me Photoshop? Yes. Much better."
"Good. I gotta go to my next class, but you can take it from here, right?"
"I think so. Thanks a ton, Gray," she said.
Gray turned to leave and opened the door straight into Natsu.
Natsu blinked. "What're you still doing here?" he said.
"Helping out a friend," Gray said. "Don't worry, I was just leaving." He pushed past Natsu and left down the hall. Natsu joined Lucy by her computer, peering at the screen as he put down his bag.
He looked closer at the finished poster. His face scrunched up in some weird emotion. It almost looked like he was upset. "Wait, you actually got it?"
"Yeah," Lucy said, tilting her head.
Natsu ran both hands through his hair. "Argh! How come that Icebox can teach it to you but not me?"
So that was it. Lucy rolled her eyes.
"What? What's that look for?"
"Natsu, you're a terrible teacher. We already established this."
"Not fairrrr," he whined, slumping down into the chair next to hers. She reached over and patted his shoulder.
"There, there. You did your best, and I'm very grateful for the effort you put into it. It just didn't work out, that's all. Not your fault." Well, she wasn't feeling particularly grateful last night when she was still frustrated, but she didn't need to mention that.
"But I wanted to be the one to help you."
"You did."
"But you didn't get it until Gray helped you."
"In this case, it's the thought that counts."
He continued to sulk, a childish pout on his face and arms crossed, slumped so far down in the chair he was practically horizontal. Lucy held back a giggle. When Natsu sulked, he went all-out to look as grumpy as possible. It was just so…Natsu.
"Look, there's still one thing you can help me with."
He didn't look up. "What?"
"How to save."
Natsu glanced at her screen, then at her. "You just hit command-S. It's like any other program."
"I know that, but that saves it as a PSD and I can't use that at the library print station, I don't think. I wanted to save it as a PDF, but there were so many options and I got confused."
Natsu's face brightened when he realized Lucy really did need help with something. "Oh, that's no problem," he said. "Any of them should be fine, but a PDF x-1a is industry standard so just use that. That's what we usually export things as in print classes."
"X-1a…"
"Yeah. Just like that."
"Oh. Okay. That's easier than I thought."
"Right? There's a lot of options so it's easy to get overwhelmed, but most of it is for stuff you'll never need, so you can just ignore it and leave it at the default settings."
"Okay. Great! Thanks, Natsu."
"No problem," he said, chest puffed with pride. Really, he got so worked up over the smallest things. At least his explanation was clear and concise this time. If he'd tried to explain any of those extra PDF options, she might have died of frustration.
Natsu was there for a class that was going to take place in the design lab shortly, so Lucy packed up and went back home until her own class. When that let out, Natsu was waiting for her.
"I hung around to work on stuff without the distractions of my apartment," he said. The usual excuse for why he waited for her every time. Well, not that she minded. It was usually dark, and she appreciated not having to walk home alone, even if it was a safe and well-traveled area.
As they left the studio, a familiar face came out of the elevators.
"Levy!" Lucy said, jogging forward to hug her roommate.
"Hey, Lu. I see Natsu's here too."
"Hi," he greeted. He eyed the large cardboard construction beside her. "And, uhh…"
Gajeel's head peered from around the side of the sculpture. "Yo."
Lucy jumped, not expecting his head to pop out like that. "Jeez, Gajeel. Leave it to you to make something so unwieldy."
"Actually it's mine," Levy said. "He's just helping me carry it for obvious reasons." It was probably taller than Levy herself, seeing as even Gajeel was dwarfed by it. But this abstract shape wasn't something Lucy had come to expect of Levy.
"I'd never work with something as flimsy as cardboard," Gajeel said, sounding a little annoyed that they'd even consider the idea.
"It's different from your usual, Levy," Lucy noted.
Levy adjusted her headband thoughtfully. "Yeah, well I wanted to get away from my usual style and do something that wasn't typographic for once. I'm not sure how I like it, but I tried."
"It looks good," Lucy said. "Very abstract."
"Thanks for the effort," Levy said wryly.
When it came to sculpture, Lucy couldn't tell a Play Dough creation from a fine arts masterpiece, and they both knew it. Most artists at least had a vague idea about the other fine arts fields, but Lucy was not one of those artists. Even that poster she just made, she was simply trusting that Natsu or Gray would've pointed out any glaring design mistakes. The only arts thing she was confident in were her sketches and painting.
After Gajeel dropped Levy's sculpture off where she needed it to be, they went back to the boys' apartment together to hang out. The boys, of course, promptly got into an argument that they, of course, had to settle with arm wrestling. Honestly, these two were too much.
While Natsu and Gajeel were at a stalemate, there was a knock on the door.
"Did someone order takeout?" Levy said.
"Wasn't us," Gajeel said, not taking his eyes away from his contest with Natsu.
"Maybe Gray forgot his keys," Lucy wondered aloud, getting up to answer the door since Gajeel and Natsu were both too focused on winning to bother answering the door in their own apartment.
She opened the door to find her favorite redhead behind it.
"Erza? You didn't say you were coming. You surprised me when you knocked," Lucy said.
"When I hear both my roommates are hanging out over here without me, of course I'll come," Erza said. Her eye caught sight of Natsu and Gajeel behind Lucy. "Oo, is this arm wrestling? I'll cream you both."
"It's fine even if you don't," Natsu said quickly.
"Face my challenge like men," Erza said. She rolled up her sleeves and marched to the table where the two were seated. "Natsu, you first. Show me what you've got."
"This can only end in blood," Levy said, standing beside Lucy with her arms crossed and a look of pity on her face.
Lucy closed the apartment door. "May their poor souls rest in peace," she added.
In the end, it was Erza who won the last bowl of ice cream, and the boys were left nursing their strained arm muscles. And when Gray got home later, it was only fair that Erza would challenge him as well. His punishment for losing was to go out and buy another carton of ice cream. So they all got ice cream in the end, even if the boys also got a couple sore right arms.
Sore arms that they would use to hang up Lucy's posters the next day. The boys always complained, but in reality, they were putty in the girls' hands.
"This isn't friendship. This is just cruel," Natsu moaned, tacking up another poster in a place Lucy wasn't able to reach on her own.
"Yeah, yeah," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "You can leave anytime, you know."
"No, I'm helping," Natsu said as if it were obvious.
Lucy smiled. Putty.