Chapter 10: A Typical Highschool Day
"ALRIGHT RECRUITS!" Cyrus yelled from attention, his voice bellowing through the dorm, shaking the walls. "WAKE THE HELL UP!"
The team jumped awake. Damien snapped bolt upright, and Axel fell out of bed onto the floor. Sebastian slowly raised his face from his pillow.
"No need to yell. I've been awake for the past half hour." Sebastian darted a look at Cyrus in his groggy state.
Axel looked up from the floor.
"Dude, how the hell are you up already?" he asked, checking the clock. "We went to bed 6 hours ago!"
"Sleep is for the weak, Axel. Unfortunately for me, I don't fit that description. Unless my body shuts down. Which, considering last night, it probably will."
Damien got out of bed and stretched. He paused mid stretch and looked at Cyrus.
"Wait. So you woke us up at 7:30 in the morning?! We don't have class for over an hour and a half!"
Cyrus grinned.
"Where I'm from, 15 minutes early is 15 minutes late."
Axel got up and started to get changed.
"Dude. That makes NO sense," he said as he wrestled his arms into his shirt.
"Oh, but it does. And even if it didn't, I'm the leader, and what I say goes."
"Fantastic," Damien said, stretching out his legs.
"Well, at least now we have time for breakfast," Sebastian said as the boys finished getting ready, and they all headed to the cafeteria for breakfast.
As they took their seats, Axel looked down at his tray, confused.
"Uh, guys?" he asked. "I know the schedule says that this is supposed to be biscuits and gravy, but I honestly can't tell if those are biscuit chunks or something else entirely."
Cyrus nodded, a look of disgust forming on his face as well.
"They look like if you dunked oats in water, threw them in a blender, shit in it, and turned it on."
Damien and Sebastian looked up from their trays, both of them halfway finished with their food already.
"Doesn't taste bad to me," Sebastian said.
"Me neither, '' Damien added, a bit gravy dripping from his mouth, which he wiped off. "Then again, you can't really get picky when you live on the streets."
Axel sat there for a minute, pondering how to approach the slop covering his tray. His eyes flickered, and he snapped his fingers, an idea forming in his brain. He got up.
"Where you going, man?" Damien asked, "You haven't even touched your food.. I promise it really isn't that bad."
"I'm working on that," Axel replied, turning to walk off, "unlike you guys, I don't plan on eating gravy soup for breakfast." He walked off, and came back with two slices of bread.
"Ok, so now you have gravy soup and some bread," Cyrus said, looking puzzled.
"Just you wait." Axel said with a smile. He held the bread in his hand, then charged it with electricity, toasting it perfectly. He then proceeded to put the toast in the biscuit/gravy mix, and soaked it up like a sponge. He held up his creation, and ate it in three bites. A look of pride grew on his face. "Ha. and I didn't even get my hands dirty."
Cyrus chuckled, and flicked some gravy on Axel's shirt.
"There. Now we're all even."
Axel did not take this very well.
"Bro! What the hell?!" He stormed off to the bathroom to wash it off.
Cyrus turned back to the rest of the group.
"Who wants to just go to class and see how long he takes in there?"
Damien and Sebastian raised their hands, chuckling to themselves and finishing their meal.
Forty-five minutes later, Damien, Cyrus, and Sebastian were all sitting in Professor Oobleck's class, learning about the Great War.
"So, in conclusion: historically, humanity has been proven to have a knack for conflict, be it with Grimm, the faunus, or themselves. Which, in my personal opino-
Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door.
BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG.
"Let me iiiiin!"
Oobleck zipped open the door to find Axel, dripping wet, his hand still in the air. Axel's face turned beet red.
"Professor! I'm so sorry to disturb your class, sir."
"Oh no, you weren't disturbing a thing. We were just wrapping up, actually. Would you care to explain why you show up to my class five minutes before it ends?"
Axel's head drooped in embarrassment.
"I, uh, have a note," he said as he handed the small slip of paper to Oobleck, who skimmed it.
"So you do. Well, this saves you from a tardy, but you still need to catch up on everything we went over today. So, be sure to read chapters 1-3 in your textbook tonight. and, just to be sure you aren't just going to skip it, I want an essay on each chapter on my desk by tomorrow morning." He said as he resumed his lecture.
Axel groaned as he rejoined his team. He sat down next to Sebastian, who burst out laughing.
"Dude. why are you dripping?" he asked.
"And how did you get a note?" Damien asked
Axel's face turned even more red.
"Well, so uh, I went to the bathroom to wash off that biohazard you guys called breakfast, but that stuff wouldn't come out."
"Yeah, but that doesn't explain why you are absolutely soaked." Cyrus said as he looked him up and down. "And is that a different shirt?"
Axel slumped into his seat a little further.
"Yeah. So I might have tried to burn out the stain with my semblance. You know, like an iron?" The boys nodded. "Well it didn't work the way I'd hoped. My shirt caught fire, and it set off the fire alarms, and the sprinklers went off, and now the whole first floor, as well as myself, is dripping wet."
"Ok, but how did you get the note?" Damien asked again.
Axel sunk all the way down to the floor.
"The nurse wanted to check on me for burns and stuff. Luckily, because my body is electrically insulated for my semblance, it has a sort of resistance to heat, so the little fire that ruined my shirt didn't cause any physical damage. But I still got a note, though."
The boys laughed at Axel's expense, and Oobleck dismissed the class. Team CSRD went out into the hallway and headed to their next class.
Later in the day, after classes were finished, Sebastian was sitting outside on a bench in the courtyard minding his own business when some dude and his buddies approached him.
"If it isn't Sebastian from team Custard." The muscular male student walked closer to Sebastian, his friends following him.
"And you are?" Sebastian looked at all four of them with a face that simply said, "you're bothering me, go away."
"The name's Cardin. I'm the leader of Team CRDL."
"Oh you mean the beefcake squad?" Sebastian gave a shrewd attitude with the insult. "Haven't heard of any of you. You all must not be popular enough."
"What was that, you little punk?" The friend with the green mohawk stepped in. "A faunus like you doesn't even belong here!"
"Neither does that dead ferret on your head. It doesn't compliment your face at all. Even if it could, it wouldn't matter. They both look like roadkill."
The friend got pissed off by Sebastian's comment on his choice of out-of-style haircut. "You piece of crap! I swear, one more comment out of that mouth of yours and I won't hesitate."
He was inches away from Sebastian's face.
"Hesitate to do what? Get a haircut?" Sebastian gave the dude a smug look to piss him off further.
"Alright, That's enough, Russel." said Cardin, stepping in to stop Russel from doing anything that would humiliate him even further.
"I wonder how your parents would feel knowing they failed to raise a half-mannered trashy cat like yourself?" He spit in Sebastian's face and turned around, walking back to his teammates.
"Excuse me? What was that?" Sebastian's face grew more serious, his tone dropping his sarcastic nature. Russel turned around to face him.
"You heard me." Russel sneered, giving Sebastian a crud smile as if he won an argument.
"Now, I don't care if people insult my looks or who I am in general." His footsteps grew louder with each step towards Russel. "But if there is ONE THING I cannot stand, it is someone having the AUDACITY to insult my parents." At this point Sebastian was right in Russel's face. "Now normally I wouldn't give some punk like you the time of day. I don't like the thought of having to fight people in general. But YOU. YOU just worked your way up my shit list. And let me tell you that that list has some very nasty people on it."
"Oh yeah?" Russel prepared himself to punch Sebastian. "You won't be talking high and mighty after I do this!" He threw out a not-so-well-hidden punch that Sebastian stopped by using his telekinetic semblance.
"After you do what exactly? Punch me?" Sebastian taunted Russel as he struggled to move his arm even by an inch. "You're gonna have to try a little harder than that if you want to get the jump on me."
"The hell? Why can't I punch this asshole?" Russel's confusion turned to anger in the tense moment.
"All that bark and no bite, eh Russel?" Sebastian tightly closed his left hand into a fist, one that is ready for impact. "Let me show you how it's done." Sebastian let loose a mighty haymaker, knocking Russel flying back, his body landing and sliding on the ground, scraping his uniform up in the process. Sebastian took a few deep breaths to relax himself and looked at Cardin who just stared back at him, eyes wide open.
"Sorry about that. He pissed me off. If you came for a nice little chat, I'm afraid that will have to wait some other time." He turns around and walks off to the dorms waving goodbye to them. "It was a pleasure meeting you all regardless. Except Russel of course." He turned and continued walking, mumbling to himself. "What a chump."
"No! I'm the leader, and what I say goes!" Cyrus yelled, reaching for the remote as Damien held it over his head.
"I already told you. If we watch one more episode of that damn cooking show, I'm gonna shove my head in an oven!" Damien yelled back.
"Come on, man, it's risotto night!"
"I don't care. I can't handle watching people make all that food, and being stuck on a campus meal plan. It's just not fair!"
"You can pick after this episode! Just gimme the damn remote!"
The door opens and Sebastian walks in to see them, frozen, looking at him sheepishly as they fight over the TV remote. Sebastian stopped, closing the door behind him and just stood there, dumbfounded.
"What the hell did I miss," he asked.
Cyrus took this opportunity to yoink the remote back from Damien and switch back to the cooking channel. Damien groaned and walked over to his bed, where he started playing a game on his scroll.
Sebastian looked at Axel for answers, who was sitting on his own bed, reading a comic book. Axel shook his head and shrugged, his nose still in the book.
"They've been at this for hours," he said, "I knew only having one TV was going to be a problem, I just didn't expect it to get this bad so soon."
Sebastian walked over to his own bed, pulled out Siberia, and started tossing it in the air, spinning it with his semblance.
"Well, while they were fighting over the remote earlier, I punched a dude in the face." Sebastian said nonchalantly, as all his teammates turned and looked at him with a stupid surprised look on all of their faces.
"You punched a who in the what now?" Axel stupidly asked.
"Some guy named Russel insulted my parents. So I punched his lights out. He was part of Team CRDL I believe."
"You mean Cardin's team?" Cyrus asked, his face growing more concerned by the second. "You do realize they're like the third ranked team in the school, right?"
"So? Didn't seem so tough when I saw them." Sebastian remarked.
"Dude. Those guys break bones FOR FUN," Damien said, "You can't just knock a CRDL guy's teeth in and expect to walk away scott-free."
"Well I just did," Sebastian said with a shrug. "Dude had it coming, anyways."
The rest of the team just sat there in a ridiculous mixture of confusion, surprise and fear. They remained that way for a few minutes, until Damien tackled Cyrus for the remote as soon as the show came back on.