“What
are your classes?” Bren asked.
“English, Algebra, Piano, and then
Government,” she said.
“You play piano?” Dani asked, “That’s
sweet.”
“It’s fun,” Asta said.
“How long?”
“Until you get tired of it,” Asta said.
“I meant how long have you been playing,”
Dani said, “Silly.”
“I know,” Asta said, “I was joking.” She
tried to not smile, thinking it would make the joke funnier, but failed.
Dani had been caught off guard. Certainly,
she hadn’t been expecting a joke out of this little quiet psychic girl. She
didn’t laugh at first, but when she did she thought it sounded really awkward
so she had to stop herself, “Oh no, I can’t believe how dumb that sounded, that
laugh, it was, like, high pitched screams from a whale dying on a beach or
something.”
“You made Dani get self-conscious,” Bren
said, “I have never seen that happen before.”
“Sorry,” Asta said.
“No,” Dani said, “The proper response is to
say, daps.” Dani presented her fist.
They shared a daps. The instinct was natural
to Dani, but she saw how awkwardly Asta raised her fist. Dani slowed her
momentum tremendously; her ordinary velocities could crush a weaker opponents
fist bump and she had no intention of wounding Asta. It was so successful.
“So, Bren,” Dani said, “Did I hear you say
you’re going to give up the chase for today?”
“Yeah,” she said, “It’s getting late. And I
know where it is. It makes too much sense. This is probably a ploy to get me
more interested in them. They’ve been calling me ever since I came back. Trying
to get me to join.”
“Back from where?” Asta asked.
Bren didn’t say anything for a second. They
were crossing the bridge headed south into Downtown. A pair of vicious looking
thugs passed the other way, eyeing the girls in such a way that thankfully
implied only a threat of violence and nothing else. Bren was looking for an
excuse to get into a fight, and she swore,
if some guy got frisky with the eyes a lot of pent up rage was going to get
unpent real quick. “I went to a bit of a magical place when I was your age,”
Bren said, “I don’t know how to put it, other than that I was given a quest,
and I completed it.”
“A quest?” Asta asked, “Like some kind of
Narnia thing?”
“A Narnia thing is the perfect way to put
it,” Bren said, “I saved a village of critters from an ancient evil and got a
magical gauntlet called Hopeful Serenity. I think the quest was supposed to
give me an appreciation for myself, like, so that I’d respect myself as I am.
There was some stuff in there about, just being yourself.”
“What makes you think that?” Asta asked.
“It happened after some… some awful stuff
happened to me,” Bren said, “It was like someone decided I needed to be
reminded that I’m not determined by what other people think of me, but what I know I’m capable of.”
“Do you feel like that now?” Asta asked, “I
mean, did it work?”
“I don’t know,” Bren said, “All I really got
out of it was that gauntlet that lets me… uh… this is going to sound bad.”
“What is?” Asta asked.
“Listen, when I got back, there were a lot
of people who knew about what I’d done, and they’d wanted revenge. When I was
on my quest, I was fighting these things called Goons; where I was at, they took
the shape of the critters I was helping. They were something like a cross
between a crustation and a… I guess something fluffy. A bunny maybe.”
“The goons or the critters?” Asta asked.
“The critters,” Bren said, “Little crab
bunnies.”
“Sounds weird,” Dani said, “You never told
me what they looked like.”
“Who came after you after you got back?”
Asta asked. She didn’t like the interruption.
“People came for me,” Bren said, “I’d been
pretty sure that, bam, I’d go on a quest and be expected to return to my regular
life. But it turns out there are higher forces in the world. And they care when
you meddle in their affairs. A lot of them saw me as a potential mercenary and
tried to hire me. Others saw me as something that would grow into a threat. I
had to defend myself, Asta, more than a few times.”
“You fought people,” Asta said, “I guess
that makes sense.”
“I killed
people, with help from Hopeful Serenity,” Bren said, “Lots of them. Luckily
the Four Societies keep police from getting involved; otherwise I’d probably be
wanted for more than a handful of murders.”
“Oh,” Asta said.
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