NOVEL WEB Chapter 5: Invitations of a Mastermind
Elliot walked across the little gravel path with her bag slung over her shoulder. Classes had started, as they had the horrific habit of doing. She’d spent her time acclimatizing, but getting used to Crescent Moon was accompanied by a truly colossal sense of cognitive dissonance. There was the cafeteria. The food was great, but don’t eat the chocolate pudding, its effects on your stomach were probably banned by the Geneva Convention. There was the main science building. Careful not to trip over the first step, it was loose. And there was the half-giant-spider girl climbing in through the top-floor window designed for that exact purpose. Have a wonderful day!
She shook her head. Maybe at some point the fact that there were some students who rode in to class on other students would become normal. But it wasn’t there yet. At least the coursework itself was exactly what she’d expected. Well, it was what she’d expected before she’d arrived here. There were no divination classes, no studies of magical creatures or how to do spells. Something about the presence of a girl who seemed to be mostly a cloud of bubbling gas with little stars in it had given her the feeling that her classes would be as esoteric as the rest of Crescent Moon, but it was all rather mundane. Except that she was pretty sure the teacher was a vampire. Either that or the woman had never seen the sunlight for more Oregon-related reasons.
Elliot had done her best to get used to everything as best she could. As it turned out, girls weren’t any less intimidating just because they weren’t human, and definitely not less pretty for it. Malena, the eldritch abomination that had shown them around, managed to marry a kind of homely cuteness with the fact that she could swallow this solar system whole as a snack, and it made Elliot shake in her boots, literally and figuratively. There was a cute ghost girl sophomore in her building who had a tendency to walk through walls when she forgot that this was considered impolite.
She waved over at McKenzie and Brett, who were waiting for her, sitting on a bench by the main entrance. Brett noticed her and waved back shyly, sipping a coffee cup from the place by the cafeteria. McKenzie, seemingly without looking up from her phone, had spotted her anyway and also raised her hand. The school’s network wasn’t great, McKenzie had told her. There was no connection to the Internet, and the network itself was primarily used for grading, allowing ill or disabled students to sit in on classes from the comfort of the dorms, and for the university’s own little social network. McKenzie hated it, describing it as the worst features of the two biggest ones rolled up into a single mess of a timeline-feed that both limited character use and picture uploading. Of course, she was also digging roots deep into the system, trying to suss out the popular kids, the people to be respected and worried about. She was Networking. It wasn’t going well.
Brett, on the other hand, seemed to be doing fine. Not great, of course, but he’d taken remarkably well to the presence of all the monster people, and he’d seemingly been adopted by several of them, who found him, in their words ‘precious’. He seemed to do a lot of annoyed grumbling, but never actually said anything to make them stop. Despite Elliot’s initial impression of him, of the spoiled bratty rich kid, he had clearly endeared himself to some of the older students, and he’d learned a lot. For one, most of them had come here from all over the US. Crescent Moon was the first -- and currently only one -- of its kind in North America. The school board had pretty much bought the town of Crescent and then altered the landscape to keep the University hidden until they were ready for the world.
Despite the ‘taller’ students taking such a liking to Brett, the four of them -- Jonas wasn’t joining them today -- had stuck together a lot. There was safety in familiarity, and Elliot needed some familiarity. The girl across the hall from her dorm had been dead for five years, and her head had a tendency to fall off. Elliot needed some familiarity. An upstate rich boy was exactly that. Not that she needed him, of course. Just what he represented. Even if he was adorable, in a mildly annoying kind of way.
“Hey, y’all,” she said as she approached. McKenzie nodded grumpily. Elliot shot a questioning look at Brett. “Who peed in her cereal?” Brett nearly choked on his drink and he had to drip out over the trash can, giggling softly to himself.
“Coffee, actually,” he said when he finally had a hold of himself and his windpipe. “The barista refused to serve her actual, literal poison.” Elliot frowned and looked over at McKenzie, who managed to drink angrily from her own cup. McKenzie was the kind of person who could do the dishes at someone, although she reserved her ire for people who had wronged her or the people she cared about. Elliot was just glad she used her bully-powers for good these days.
“Just because ‘humans can’t digest it’,” she said in a mocking voice, “doesn’t mean I don’t want to know what it’s like.” She tossed her empty cup and stuck her tongue out at Brett. “And he hasn’t been letting me vent about it without making fun of me.” Elliot raised an eyebrow at Brett, who displayed a masterful poker-face.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I am innocence personified.” Elliot bit her tongue not to laugh at McKenzie, who scrunched her face so hard it looked like it was imploding. “Besides, I’m pretty sure ‘ectofrappucino’ doesn’t taste nearly as good as it looks.”
“What did it look l--” Elliot began.
“Glue,” Brett answered with a cocky grin as the three of them made their way inside the main building. “Just like a cup of glue, with crushed ice.” The campus itself was easy enough to navigate. There was a main building, with a few smaller ones dotted around the landscape as the school’s needs had grown, but the main faculty building itself was absolutely massive and sprawling. It was an interesting mixture of modern architecture and older English-style university buildings, so you’d get weird amalgamations of Gothic arches and skywalks. Elliot definitely didn’t hate it, but it did make the whole thing more than a little difficult to navigate. Not every set of stairs went where she expected them to go, and some halls seemed to loop in on themselves.
“Which way…” Elliot wondered out loud as they stood in the middle of a seven-way intersection halfway through the building. McKenzie pointed in a direction, nudging Elliot with her hip. Elliot looked down the hall, and then at her friend, and then back at the hall. More specifically, she looked at who and what was down that hall.
“You just want to bump into Toby, don’t you?” Elliot said with a sideways glance. Brett smirked too, but McKenzie did not seem to care one iota what either of them thought. She just raised her chin up haughtily.
“One: Yes. I’m not ashamed of what I am.”
“Thirsty?” Brett offered. McKenzie shot him a withering glance that bounced off him effortlessly, and then huffed.
“A woman, Brett. With needs.”
“You’re like nineteen. What do you even need wolf boys f--”
“Anyway. Two: I really do think our class is that way. I had a longer look at the campus bible than you did yesterday, Elliot. I’ll pretend I can’t see your look of shock and terror.” Elliot played up her little charade even more, swooning dramatically, only for Brett to swoop in and catch her like a fair maiden. She blushed as she stood up. Why was she blushing? Brett was just playing along, after all. McKenzie shot them both a look. “And three: Malena is down that hall too, and I get the feeling you two nerds wouldn’t mind bumping into her, either.”
Brett and Elliot looked at each other, both their cheeks red. Brett looked a little confused, and Elliot realized that he didn’t realize she was gay yet. Going by his behaviour, she was pretty sure he’d be cool about it, but coming out to someone was always a risky endeavour. If necessary, she could just play this particular event off as her being scared of the hot sc-- well, the scary girl. She would probably have to drop the ‘hot’ if she didn’t want to immediately out herself as the gayest girl on the block.
“S-shut up,” Brett stammered, earning him a wolfish grin from McKenzie. He really leaned into whole wounded-kitten energy he seemed to already have naturally, exacerbated only by the fact that his shaggy hair was just long enough for him to have to brush it out of his face. Elliot realized she was staring at his face. He reminded her of a video game character sometimes, but she couldn’t put her finger on which. One of the twinky ones. He was certainly nice enough.
“Yeah,” Elliot said, throwing an arm over his shoulder. “We’re not as monster-thirsty as you are, McKenzie.” The other girl crossed her arm and raised her eyebrows.
“Uh-huh. Sure. Let’s just go, yeah? Before you two win an Oscar.” Brett giggled, and Elliot couldn’t help but smile at the sound he’d made. He was even shorter than her. A part of her wanted to pat him on the head. ‘Precious’ really was the right word. As they made their way down the hall, Toby and Malena waved at them.
“You guys have class this way, yeah?” Toby asked, already walking alongside them, looking characteristically excited to go on a walk. “I can get you there; this wing is a mess. The second floor is inverted.”
“What does that me--”
“You’ll see,” he said with a little smirk. McKenzie smiled up at him with her tongue between her teeth. He occasionally shot her a glance back, Elliot noticed, and the two of them made a lot of eye contact. She didn’t know how McKenzie did it. It was so easy for her. For Elliot, it had always been a matter of months of slowly circling each other, trying to figure out if the other girl was flirting, both scared to make the first move, until she finally did and the other girl had really turned out to not be gay. McKenzie just found a tall guy that made her bite her lip and it wasn’t long before she was running her fingers through that guys’ hair. Or fur, probably.
Elliot decided to stop thinking of Toby’s fur, letting him and McKenzie talk on their own for a bit. She focused on Malena, who had also joined them, and found it to be a mistake. Malena’s eye contact was like getting hit right in the hormones with a sledgehammer. She wasn’t even that tall. Okay, she was tall, and to Brett, she was probably intimidating as all hell. She checked on the boy, who was doing an admirable job of avoiding Malena’s gaze.
“You guys holding up alright?” Malena asked innocently as she looked sideways at Elliot. “Courses not too hard?” Something about the slightly upturned corners of her mouth, that little smirk, made it hard for Elliot to think, and Brett’s stammering made it clear that feeling wasn’t exclusive to just her.
“Y-yeah,” she said. “We’ve had some time to prepare for the coursework, so a lot of it is just repetition of stuff I’ve already been studying last year.” Malena nodded, listening intently as Elliot talked. It was unnerving. People had a tendency, in Elliot’s experience, to wait for their turn to speak. But Malena simply listened in rapt attention, with all the patience of an advancing glacier. She had a similar air of inevitability to her.
“So I’m doing a-alright.” Brett just confirmed similar experiences in as few words as possible.
“Joined any student groups yet?” Malena asked innocently.
“I’ve been… looking at one or two,” Elliot said, softly. “No major decision yet.”
“Well, there’s the LGBTQ+ society. I’m the chairwoman this year, and we’d love to have you,” Malena said, and Elliot’s entire body tensed up. Had she really been that easily discovered?
“What makes you th--”
“Oh, we allow allies too, of course. We’re a very inclusive group. I’d love to see you both there. This is my stop.”
“What?” Elliot asked, and then realized that Malena was already stepping into the open classroom. Toby, too, waved at them as he trotted over to his desk, saying hi to his classmates. McKenzie seemed sad to let him go.
“What did y’all talk about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Brett said, and Elliot couldn’t help but wonder why he acted like he’d seen a ghost. They were all over the place, he should’ve been over it by now.
