\u201cI can\u2019t believe this,\u201d says Lucy.<\/p>\n
She walks back towards the dormitory. The underground fighting tournament of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, where secondary school students do their level best to be badass, has not impressed her.<\/p>\n
\u201cHand puppets,\u201d she says. \u201cHand puppets.<\/i> Prophets who can\u2019t even see their own blindness. Four-armed apes. And you<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
She glares at Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are we even walking together?\u201d she says. \u201cYou are a stupid human.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily shrugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cI like to dance,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are a terrible dancer,\u201d says Lucy.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve never seen me,\u201d says Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is transparently obvious,\u201d Lucy says. She waves a hand dismissively. \u201cGit. Go. I am going to the Konami Thunder Dance club to work off tension. I do not want it polluted with your human cooties.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat would probably be why we\u2019re walking together,\u201d says Emily. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in Max, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNeither am I!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI just thought I\u2019d say,\u201d Emily says. \u201cAfter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am the evil prophet of space.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSpace does not like you,\u201d says Lucy. \u201cYou people. You look outwards towards space. You make puppy-dog faces. You project onto space with your purposes and expectations. Space is confused and nauseated by this! Space is not your frontier. It is a cold bleak void! You need to stop hoping and dreaming towards it. So I am here to kill everyone in hopes that this will make you stop!<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI see,\u201d says Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d says Emily, \u201cyou\u2019re going to have some trouble with that, on account of I bet I can take you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBah,\u201d says Lucy. \u201cI was not fighting seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emily squints at her.<\/p>\n
Then she giggles.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not into girls, either,\u201d Emily says.<\/p>\n
Lucy gives her a horrid look.<\/p>\n
\u201cFine,\u201d she says. \u201cI like Max. Stop squinting and giggling at me like that. He will be the last to die. Or possibly the first to die. I cannot decide what order humanity should be killed in. You are all too irrelevant. But seriously, hand puppets? He is a disappointment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019d like you more if you didn\u2019t <\/i>kill humanity,\u201d teases Emily.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou seem markedly more equable about this than I expected,\u201d Lucy admits.<\/p>\n
Emily grins at her.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere,\u201d she says. She pushes open the door to the Konami Thunder Dance club. \u201cLet me show you what a svart-elf\u2019s god-daughter can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not a god,\u201d says Lucy, uncertainly; only \u2014<\/p>\n
In those days, gods walked among us, courtesy of the Konami Corporation; and Emily, it turns out, over the course of their dueling, is very good indeed.<\/p>\n
Lucy has tried to dance an expression of it \u2014<\/p>\n
Lucy has tried to dance before Emily the purity of it; the awfulness of it: the full dread hopelessness and pointlessness of humanity in the face of the wicked god of space. But woven through Emily\u2019s music \u2014 flowing through her Symbols, through her dancing, in it and within it \u2014<\/p>\n
There are magical jaguars falling, endlessly, around the Earth.<\/p>\n
Lucy can\u2019t even figure out how that could apply, how that could be an answer;<\/i> but it pierces through the wall of despair she tries to build for the other girl anyway. It shatters it, it circles around it; and in the end, Lucy\u2019s thunder dance stands at 95% completion, and Emily\u2019s gets a perfect score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cI can\u2019t believe this,\u201d says Lucy. She walks back towards the dormitory. The underground fighting tournament of the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth, where secondary school students do their level best to be badass, has not impressed her. \u201cHand puppets,\u201d she says. \u201cHand puppets. Prophets who can\u2019t even see their own blindness. Four-armed apes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4824,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"series":[47],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-storm-that-saw-itself-chapter-2","series-the-storm-that-saw-itself"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/KTD3.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6174,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/6174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}