fandomhighdorms | The Pool; Monday During Classes [02/11].

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The Pool; Monday During Classes [02/11].

Not realizing yet that the one class she'd wished to avoid would actually be cancelled that day, Astrid decided she would just go ahead and skip all of her Monday rigmarole, especially if it helped make it seem a bit less like she was singling out any particular class. Part of her wondered if there was much point to skipping, especially since next week was spring break, she could suck it up for another day, but she'd said she was probably going to, and she felt she almost had to, especially if it wound up Mae would join her. Besdies, after the weekend, she felt she needed a skip day for an actual, solid reason now, too. Her head was swimming with her renewed memory, clashing against everything she'd conjectured while her whole life was nothing but a blank slate, an empty canvas that she'd rigerously tried to cover as she poured through all the letters in her desk from her mother, all of her mother's journals, all of her books of poetry, and Astrid's own sketchbooks.

It created a fascinating, brilliant, almost god-like image in her mind of this woman who was supposedly her mother, this effervescant force of nature that seemed mythical and unreal. And even though Astrid tried to search through nearly every line and in between, she couldn't find much of herself in there. There were a few things, here and there, her mother talking about how much she missed her, remincicing about them living in Paris, in Amsterdam, in Mexico; her mother mentioned how Astrid would draw, but she didn't need that clue, she'd already answered that one for herself. There were a few that seemed a little vitriolic, anger over some things she'd done or hadn't done, things she'd taken an interest in: someone named Ray, a decision to dye her hair red, something about homecoming court, pink dresses and hopeful heels. She appeared in a few of the poems, a few journal entries, but alwaya addressed like she was just another one of Ingrid's poems, a work of art, something she created to be beautiful and reflective, another mark left on the world. Though she'd spent all of yesterday, hunched over piles of books and paper loaded on her bed, she'd gone to sleep that night with not much more of an idea of who she was than she'd had when she'd woken up on Saturday.

And when she woke up today...the memories were back, she knew who she was, but that perspective stayed and she started to wonder. Who was she, really? Was Amnesiac Astrid onto something? Was she really anything more than something Ingrid had willed into being, to be a reflection of her own genius, only the problem with a person over a poem is that you couldn't quite just edit and rewrite it to be what you wanted it to be.

So Astrid skipped her classes, she went down to the pool, she swam laps until she felt too tired for more, and then found a floating tube in the supplies closet that she could just settled into and float around in, staring at the ceiling, trying to get her thoughts sorted out and trying to convince herself that she should really get going on that idea to paint the ceiling down here and wondering what color the sky in California would be just then.

[[ open pool is open! ]]

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The weekend had been extremely weird. Mae was fully committed to Not Thinking About It.

A day of truancy hanging out at an indoor pool sounded like the perfect way to do that.

"Hey Astrid," she greeted as she came down. "Wow, look at this place!"

Clearly she had somehow still not yet done enough exploring.

Astrid tilted her head back, since she'd drifted in a way that left her facing the opposite direction of the door and smiled faintly. "Hey, Mae," she said. "Welcome to the pool."

And she was actually kind of glad to hear that voice; she was getting kind of sick of listening to her own in her head all day, and there was a certain satisfaction, maybe even pride, that the cat-faced girl had taken her up on her offer. She paddled her hands in the water a little, so she was doing a bit less random drifting and a little more coming closer to where Mae had come in.

Mae hopped down to sit on the pool edge, tugging off her boots and tossing them aside so she could stick her feet in the water. "You'd think 'there's a pool in the basement' would be part of the orientation," Mae said. "Though I guess it gets drowned out by the gremlins."

Or maybe people tended to think it was a standard prank on the new kids.

Astrid snorted a laugh at that. "Yeah," she said, incredibly dry for someone floating in a pool, "there's a lot they left out of the orientation. Who even needs classes when half the teaching is done by the learning curve of just living here?"

"Maybe that's the secret," Mae mused. "The school is just, like, a front for the actual School of Life."

"Which seems like it could be a good selling point," Astrid said, her attention turning to the ceiling again, stopping herself at the edge of the pool by putting out a leg, "until you realize that those lessons come in the form of little monsters that bite you into thinking you're someone else, giant singing fish out for revenge, and memory loss. Though I think I can forgive it for that last one if we wind up with Vikings on the school trip coming up, like we got Ancient Greeks on the last one."

She couldn't help it; it was just in her blood. She'd probably forgive this place anything if she got Vikings out of the deal.

". . . Giant singing revenge fish?"

Mae would normally assume that was a joke or a metaphor. But, well. She was starting to get an inkling about how this place actually worked.

"Oh, no one told you about that one yet?" Astrid asked, sounding pretty removed from the whole thing even though she'd honestly found it absolutely terrifying. It had taken her months to get over it, and it still sort of lingered. "That was over the summer. There were these weekly summer camp competitions, and the prize was one of those singing novelty fish things. Everyone hated it, and so we'd all sort of mess with it, leave our mark. I had it twice; I branded it and gave it to Sabine to paint the first time, then sent it off to sea in a Viking funeral the second.

"Anyway, after a whole summer of various tortures and upgrades, I guess the fish came to life and grew to an enormous size, and sought revenge by trapping a bunch of us in this sort of dark, shadowy void where I'm pretty sure we were haunted by the sins of our past, or something. "

That's what it had been for her, anyway. And, despite her attempts to sound very nonchalant about it, she couldn't help a shiver, goosebumps rising up all along her exposed, damp arms.

Edited 2019-02-11 20:46 (UTC)

"Oh my god." Mae's eyes had gone even larger than normal. "That is so distressing! What the hell?!"

"Life Lesson learned, though," Astrid pushed off the side of the pool a little to send herself in a light, totally nonchalant, really, spin. "Be nice even to random stuff, because you never know what'll come back to haunt your dreams forever."

Thanks, Fandom High!

But being mean to stuff was a significant part of Mae's coping method!

"I feel like you should be able to count on mechanical singing fish not to seek revenge in the night. Like. That should just be a universal rule."

Oh god. What if the Food Donkey automata decided to roam around and seek revenge on Possum Springs?

. . . Okay, that would be pretty cool.

"I'm pretty sure that one flew under everyone's radar, really," Astrid shrugged. "And I completely agree. Too bad you weren't here for that one to let the fish know about it."

"I would have let it know in the face."

Probably with a baseball bat.

Astrid had to grin a little bit at that, picture spry little Mae facing off against that big giant singing fish, and there were now at least a few new drawings going into her sketchbook later.

"Which would be much more effective than letting it know in the tail," she noted.

"I could do it there, too. Cover my bases. But yeah, things tend to pay more attention when you get 'em in the face."

"And now I know where I can turn if I suspect any singing fish starting to act up again."

Aside from the whole small army that actually had went and got it in the face and repeatedly, of course.

"Did it just, like, exact its revenge and then go away, last time?"

Because yeah, Mae was not above just whacking fake fish with a bat on principle.

"As far as I know," said Astrid, sucking in a breath with her eyes focused firmly on the ceiling now, "as soon as the people who were outside the shadow thing holding all the lucky tortured souls inside broke through, that's when the fish made itself known and attacked. We didn't even know it was the fish until then, really, and so those people got together and took it down, and that was...kind of that. I don't really remember all the details."

Because she'd barely been in any position to even notice any of them, at that point.

"Jeez, that's fucked up," Mae said. "It sounds like something out of a weird horror movie."

"Yeah," said Astrid. "But on the bright side, nothing really quite that level has happened since, that I know about."

Lucky her, she got to skip out on that whole dead loved ones coming back from the grave bit.

"I should hope not!" Mae was not handling this information well. "That should be, like, a one time thing. Or at least like those 'hundred year floods' that you shouldn't have to worry about seeing again any time soon." She sighed. "Not that those haven't been happening every, like, five years anyway."

And the reaction sort of did surprise Astrid, a little bit. It wasn't that she expected Mae to be all gung-ho about the idea or anything, but the discomfort, while understandable, wasn't really expected to that level.

"I'm pretty sure it should actually be a never time thing," she said, and, arching a brow, latched onto the newly appearing thread. "You mean back home? You get big floods and stuff?"

"My town used to have an underground trolley system," Mae said. "Now it has an underground river with old trolley cars in it."

The look Astrid sent over was a sympathetic one, as much as it could be when you were floating around in a bunch of water and thinking that it didn't seem a bad way to spend a future.

"Probably not too late to start building an ark," she offered.

"No one's got that kind of money," Mae said with a shrug. "Last time my friend Gregg got around on the back of a dog house."

For a brief moment, Astrid almost wanted to ask if Mae's friend Gregg actually was a dog or at least had a dog's face, but ultimately thought better of it.

"See?" she said instead. "You don't need a lot of money. Just some resourcefulness."

Not according to Mae he didn't, but. . . .

"Yeah . . . having money definitely helps too, though."

If the town had any money, they could potentially fix the trolley system, for instance.

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The Pool; Monday During Classes [02/11].

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