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Young Writers Society



Globetrotters Chapter 4 – Inter-house-cross-curricular quizzing

by ExOmelas


Unknowingly, Donny and Nanya had taken a remarkably parallel approach to the situation as their Elsion counterparts. Sat in chairs opposite each other in the public library's children's section, they practised the rhyme once again.

“Divorced, beheaded and?” Donny prompted.

“Died,” supplied Nanya with a fraction of his enthusiasm.

“Divorced, beheaded?”

“Survived.”

“Who'd have thought Horrible Histories could come in so useful,” Donny sighed, “Alright are you ready for the David Lloyd George rendition of Spongebob Squarepants?”

“Who even is that?” Nanya groaned.

“I told you, he was in the liberal government when they introduced the reforms in nineteen oh six and was the British PM who signed the Treaty of Versailles and –”

“No, not him. That Bob guy.” Nanya flicked a finger.

“Oh, right. He's just a cartoon.”

“A cartoon?”

“Whole other story.” Donny rolled his head around in a wide circle. “Never mind about that. The first round is in the social area after school on Monday so you'll have one whole day to get used to our school system before we throw you into inter-house-cross-curricular quizzing.”

Nanya sighed and returned to her book about Eleanor of Aquitaine. Nanya had decided that she preferred the Lady Jane Grey. Jane was way more capable of letting her head make decisions than Eleanor and Nanya had thought that Elizabeth I had been too hotheaded and then too quick to chastise others for making mistakes she'd made in the past. It was quite enjoyable reading four thousand years worth of world history. Nanya had a fairly in depth working knowledge of Elsion's but it seemed to be at least one hundred and fifty to two thousand years behind Earth in terms of development. That was probably because of the age thing. Nanya had always known that thirty was unfairly young to die but the idea that people here could occasionally live even into their hundred and teens felt like Elsion should have gotten a head start of a millennium and been born with the notion of the wheel firmly implanted in their cavemen brains.

“How much would it be noticeable if I skipped a couple of classes to revise this stuff?” Nanya shut her book with a thud.

“Extremely,” Donny replied sternly, “Amy never misses class because she's off sick so often. She gets little colds all the time. It's not much really but if she comes back too early you can tell because her hands are really cold and her eyes are really puffy.”

“Oh.”

“But you do have all of break, lunchtime, registration, today and tomorrow so just keep reading and hope it sinks in.” Donny smiled reassuringly.

“What subject do you do?”

“For this?” Donny asked. “Chemistry. I always find it fascinating when teachers refer to the natural elements of the periodic table as 'building bricks of the world'. I just have to know what built my shoe. There's so much we miss when we only look at what we can see. If we just could be bothered to stick stuff under the microscope there must be so much we could learn about the human race.”

“Wow, you sound like Karl Trawpf,” Nanya remarked.

“Who's that?” Donny enquired.

“He runs this extremist group, the Mexterians, who're determined to get to the bottom of the world's rotten health – we die around the age of thirty back home – but anyway these guys are absolutely bonkers.” Nanya dismissed them with a flap of her hand.

“First of all, you're going to die before you're thirty? Second of all, if I was going to die that young I think I'd want to know why,” Donny countered.

“They want to carry out research on children. They seem to think there will be visible signs of ill health that we can amputate or something,” Nanya explained.

“Oh, right. They're those kind of guys.” Donny rolled his eyes.

Donny didn't say anything more on the subject of life expectancy, nor did Nanya. It was weird – being halfway through your life and someone the same age as you only just starting. Of course, it wasn't helpful that the portion of Eleanor's life that Nanya was reading actually began at age thirty. She'd peeked at the birth dates before she'd begun and Eleanor lived into her eighties. Nanya restrained herself from standing up on the chair and protesting the injustice of it all only by remembering the fact that she was in a library.

“What bit are you at?” Donny leaned over her shoulder.

“Thomas Becket's just been killed.”

“Oh! The turning point in the relationship!” Donny exclaimed under his breath.

“Actually I can already sense that the turning point was probably that time where Henry was crying over Thomas and Eleanor decided to try to help him by slandering Thomas in every way she knew how,” Nanya argued with an air of knowledge.

“Yeah, but this is when other people started to see the rift. Henry was so distant and all that people couldn't help but notice.” Donny stabbed his thigh with his finger to emphasise his point. Nanya winced. If she'd underlined her point in that way, there would already be a violet bruise flushing out from where her finger had struck her leg.

“Okay, point taken but here's a wacky idea. Why aren't you reading about chemistry?” Nanya suggested.

“I'm revising in my head,” Donny explained.

“How can you...?”

“This,” Donny indicated a piece of paper on the desk in front of him, “Is a list of all the stuff I can't remember from what they might ask me about. I'm giving myself ten minutes to come up with some answers before I get my school textbook out and look the topics over.”

Nanya glanced at the paper. On it was only a single item: equilibrium.

“I'm not even going to ask what that is…” Nanya mumbled, returning to the book.

After ten minutes, Donny slid his chair out and rummaged around in the rucksack he'd brought, producing a thick paper bound volume of about two hundred pages. He flipped open to where a page was bookmarked and had greasy food stains swarming around its text. Donny traced a line of working down from the question to the answer, pausing, frowning, then gasping as he understood each roadblock in his mind. Celia had mentioned last night that Donny desperately wanted to be clever but she'd never mentioned the fact that he already was a genius by Elsion standards.

“Do you do biology?” Nanya enquired.

“Nah, just physics and chemistry. Why?” Donny leaned an elbow on his textbook and angled his head towards Nanya.

“Just thought it would be nice to take some knowledge of the human body back home. There's a lot that puzzles us,” Nanya frowned.

“I still don't know what you mean by home. Celia's still told me nothing. And I still don't understand how somewhere can just randomly develop a crap immune system like that. Where even is Elsion? Is it some island in the Caribbean or something – but then how come you speak such good English?” Donny sounded desperate and his veins were bulging in his neck.

“Well, I don't know about the speech thing but Elsion is my equivalent of Earth and I don't care how little of this Celia wanted you to know – if she's going to make you 'take care' of me, then you're going to know who you're taking care of,” Nanya blurted. “Elsion is another world. Celia knows that there is a way to link between those two worlds but she doesn't want either world to know about it because my world will invade yours looking for medicines and yours will probably try to do experiments on mine to figure us out … Okay?”

Donny's throat contracted. Why would she be saying this? So far Nanya hadn't been overly prone to jokes. Maybe he was dreaming. He had often fantasised about the alternate universes that string theory could provide but he'd never even considered that the dimensions could be linked. This was ridiculous. Why was she saying this?

“Ha-ha. Hilarious. What are you on about?” Donny's voice wavered with the hope that maybe, she could just be telling the truth. The golden energy that had pulsated around Amy before she … well that had been impossible too hadn't it?

“I'm not kidding. I can probably find a way to prove it if you want? Or you could just ask Celia straight out?” Nanya suggested, trying to wiggle Donny's mind into belief of Elsion.

Donny made to reply that evidence would indeed be welcome but stopped himself short. Donny needed no evidence. He closed his hand into a fist and pulled his bent arm quickly down into his body three times in succession, exclaiming “Yesssss!” each time he did so. Nanya peered at him quizzically, by which point he was already grinning further than the bones of a person's face seemed like they should have allowed. He was murmuring something to himself about this being “So awesome!” and praying to God that he didn't wake up.

“What's so cool about this?” Nanya asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, it proves that there could be other worlds. Infinite dimensions for every decision humanity did or didn't make. If we can go through one, we must at least be able to observe others. We can be like the Starfleet, exploring, watching, never interfering – well, unless Kirk's on the ship, of course.” Donny giggled.

“Jeez, you made more sense when you were talking about ions!” Nanya raised her hands in exasperation.

“I wasn't saying anything about ions,” Donny frowned.

“Exactly.”

With that, Nanya returned to the life of 'The Captive Queen' and submerged in the calm sea of Earth's history.

The faces were of many shapes, colours, sizes and races but each one was united by their ability to almost cause Nanya to throw up behind the curtain. An audience of about three hundred had been raised and plonked down facing the performance area of the room they were all calling the 'Social Area'. There were props cluttered around behind the curtain – and a few wigs and jackets. This must be for putting on stage shows, the concept for which seemed a little fancy for a school. However, the rather shoddy quality of the makeshift theatre fit a school perfectly.

The tables were set out in a 'V' shape with the point leading to the back of the 'stage'. There were five two-person desks end to end to make up each line of the 'V'. This meant ten people per side – all the more people to watch as she failed miserably. Donny and his friend Cameron had taken their places at the far end of the stage left side of the 'V'. Donny noticed her peaking through the curtains and indicated the seat next to him.

“Over here, Amy, come, sit down,” he hissed.

“Okay,” Nanya agreed reluctantly.

Once she was settled, Donny turned to her and whispered with less vehemence, “This is Cammy. He's doing computing.”

Cameron's skin looked far too tanned to fit in with the pasty complexions of the majority of the school. Of course, ethnicity on Earth was diverse, but most people were either stunningly pale like the vampiric legends, or had a visibly different set of features that were unique but easy to categorise. Nanya had noticed many people that shared her shock of copper coloured hair in the school and Donny had explained that the entire country got teased for this. This befuddled Nanya no end for everyone she ever met back in Elsion had at one point or another complimented her on what they claimed to be the most vibrant shade of orange they'd ever seen.

“How many subjects does the team cover?” Nanya returned herself to the quiz.

“Ten. But each team doesn't have to cover the same ones. You're supposed to remember enough of each of your other subjects that three of you go up against a specialist. For example, if they asked you the name of Eleanor's first son, it would be three people on their team who specialise in one of the other subjects up against you.”

“So I'd say William?”

“Yeah but you have to buzz first,” Donny indicated a button placed on the desk, “You'd be the only one of us allowed to buzz. Of the other team, since they don't have anyone specialising in history, three of their buzzers light up at random and that selects who you'll be up against.”

Nanya cast her eyes towards the other team, then back to the menacing eyes of the restless audience. There were posters about school rules plastered over the walls, with positive yellow smiley faces demonstrating polite behaviour and devilish red ones exhibiting the kind of disrespect you'd expect from a Gresham, which was the name notorious within the Vurakan Championships for breeding a family of bad sportsmen. Since records began, there they'd been, accusing honest competitors of cheating while in fact dirtily sabotaging everyone they came up against. Her mother had once tried to explain to her that that particular family had fairer health than others but paid for it in their lack of strength both bodily and mentally. It was a particular defect, she'd explained, just as some families had bad hearts or bad bones; this one had bad personalities. The opposing team didn't have the eyes or manners of a Gresham, but that didn't repel the horrible flashback of last year's Vurakan final, when the entire family had conspired to rig her combat round against one of the middle Gresham daughters.

She didn't need to win this, except that she owed it to Celia for taking her in. She swept her gaze back to Donny. He was frowning at her, words of worry on the tips of his lips. She shook her head to try to dispel his anxiety but this seemed more to generate curiosity than reassurance. He cocked his head and patted her on the back, shrugging her troubled expression off and returning to his final revision of his notes.

“Alright, that's time,” a bald teacher with a puffy red face called from the side of the audience, which he was pacing along with an air of haste about him, “Donny? Did you hear me?”

Donny's head popped up like a perplexed meerkat's as he struggled to locate the source of the voice. His eyes locked onto the bald man, who was the only man in a suit in the room, “Sorry, Mr Campbell.”

The man chuckled and seemed to alleviate some tension from the room, “I've never heard a pupil apologise for revising notes before.”

Donny smiled and slid the papers and books under the desk, rolling his lips inward and exhaling about twenty metric tonnes of stress. Mr Campbell took his place in the chair that joined the two strands of the 'V'. He produced a stack of question cards from his pocket and laid them on his lap.

“Are the teams ready?” he called over the din of the excited audience.

All twenty contestants nodded silently and simultaneously.

“Audience,” Mr Campbell yelled, “Will yous shut it?!”

But for a few insistent chatters, the audience quieted and Mr Campbell was ready to begin.

He plucked a card from the pile and read in a broad, dramatic boom, “Who introduced reforms in 1906?”

Nanya thwacked the buzzer with the force she'd have loved to thump that damn Gresham's damn Gresham brother. Behind the stage curtain, a scrawny strawberry-blonde boy with horrific acne fumbled with a few switches and a spot of light flooded over her.

“Lib-eral Gov-ernment!” she half sang, half cried, earning an amused giggle from the audience, a chuckle of delight from Donny and Cameron and a mock-despairing sigh from Mr Campbell.

“I guess Donny's been imparting his Spongebob Squarepants revision technique to you,” Mr Campbell feigned an air of haughty impatience.

“Yes, sir,” Nanya nodded obediently.

“Liven up, Amy,” Mr Campbell mumbled quieter, “Are you okay?”

Nanya nodded unconvincingly which she considered fair enough given the pressure of living up to Amy's knowledge of Earth's history – which sounded like encyclopaedic.

The next question was a chemistry question, which Donny reflexively spurted out the answer to as he was still pressing the buzzer. It was a close call but since the opposing team hadn't actually moved to buzz before him – and Mr Campbell didn't voice this, but it was obvious that Donny was by far the most intelligent and dedicated person on either of the teams – it was decided that his claim to the point was just. Nanya noticed a quick fist-pump motion like the three he'd been unable to resist when he'd learned of Nanya's impossible origins. She honestly had never expected him to believe her. Perhaps she was just lucky that he'd desperately wanted to.

The next question seemed to be aimed at the Physical Education department but Nanya couldn't comprehend how it wasn't blatantly obvious to everyone in the room – Name the stretch being describe here. You are standing with one leg extended behind the body at roughly forty-five degrees to the ground and transferring your weight onto the front leg? Neither team had anybody specialising in P.E., which lit up six buzzers, three on each side. As if to balance out her horrific luck lately, Nanya's buzzer pulsed a fluorescent green, allowing her to once again smack it with all her might and tense nerves.

“The Gastrocnemius Stretch, sir!” she exclaimed, utterly perplexed as to why Championship preparation had been useful knowledge to have in this situation.

“Well, yes, yes it is. I must say, I believe Mrs MacTay slipped that in as a joke. It's not even in the P.E. Curriculum but well, I guess the joke's on her. Um, well done, Amy.”

“Thank you, sir,” Nanya nodded shakily, distracted by the fact that she'd somehow managed to actually do well.

She glanced toward Donny, who appeared to be attempting to nervously stuff his sleeve into his closed mouth.

“Amy would never have known that,” he whispered worriedly through it, it muffling his words, “I know, it's useful that you do but … please be careful. And well done,” he added, spotting her fallen smile.

Nanya nodded and resolved to not answer another sports question, given that there wasn't much of a danger of the other team swooping in and taking the points for it. If anyone asked, her super-active cousin had been over and had been doing the stretch against a wall in the living room, although she'd have to check with Donny that she did in fact have a cousin, never mind a super-active one.

There were three more history questions amidst the quiz, all of which Nanya got and only one of which she took longer than a second and a half to. After winning by a landslide, Nanya and Donny's team dispersed into age groups – all six high school year groups having been involved. Donny, Nanya and Cameron were the only fourth years on either of the teams and as such decided it best to peel away from what had ended up as a social gathering of the entire school – there were even sandwiches provided – and began the walk home.

At the front door of the school, Cameron spotted his big brother's car and remembered that he was lucky enough not to be exposed to the bitter chill of winter this Monday afternoon. Donny waved him off then led Nanya in the other direction, towards the traffic lights they'd spent six minutes waiting at that morning. After a short moment of silence between them, there came a beeping, ringing sound from Nanya's pocket.

“Ah!” Nanya yelped, “What is that?!”

“Amy's phone,” Donny shrugged, then his eyes sparked with a sudden realisation, “Wait, that's Amy's phone! You're so not ready to be Amy on the phone! People only don't see the difference between you two because you look so similar. There's no telling how different you sound. Here, give me it.”

Nanya rooted around in the pockets of the yellow and purple waterproof jacket she had removed from Amy's wardrobe that morning. She located the object that the sound was coming from: a curious flat rectangle of metal with the corners rounded off. Mostly, it was white but there was a rectangle on what she guessed was the front face that flashed with light and words. She passed it in dazed wonder to Donny, who unhesitatingly swiped his finger along the front of it, quieting the ringing noise.

“Hello, Amy's phone? She's at the toilet so this is Donny,” then he paused as if somebody was talking, then inexplicably began to have a conversation, “Oh, hey, Celia. Yeah, obviously I've no idea whether Amy's at the toilet or not but there's no way in hell your going to tell me. I should have let Nanya answer the phone,” another pause, “Wait, what? Why?” a pause again, “Oh come on, you're going to have to let me in the loop sometime! This is not fair – and please do not say anything about how childish that sounds. That is the least you can do. Goodbye, Celia.”

Nanya shied away from him as he handed her back the 'phone'. Plenty of madmen flipped and developed a habit of talking to themselves but how low did your self-esteem have to be to keep secrets from yourself?

“What … is that?” Nanya pointed to the metal in his outstretched hand.

“A phone … Oh my God, do you not have phones? How do you communicate with people?!”

“The way that we are right now, I guess. What does that thing do?” Nanya reached out to take it, the realisation beginning to form that these devices were commonplace here and therefore probably fairly safe.

“Well, the phone part lets you talk to people who aren't within hearing range but you can also listen to music, play games, access the internet although I realise that this explanation itself needs explanation and there certainly isn't time for that right now. There are much more pressing matters to attend to.” Donny shook his index finger up and down with the rhythm of his speech.

“Namely?” Nanya searched his eyes.

“You're not going home,” Donny announced firmly.

“Why?” Nanya rolled her eyes.

“That's what I asked. Right there. Celia said, 'don't let Nanya go home for a few hours'. I said, 'why?' She said, 'You don't need to know that'. I proceeded to very rudely hang up on my best friend's mum – oh crap what have I done?”

“So where the hell am I supposed to go?”

“Um, my house is probably off limits too, if you're not allowed to go home so we can't – oh! I've got it!” Donny snapped his fingers. “You're going to love this, by the sounds of all that exercise you do. You'll get hours of enjoyment, I promise.”

Donny whirled her around and pointed her in the direction of the forest and, unable to resist picking up speed, he began to sprint towards the tree, and the spot below it that was the last place he'd seen Amy.


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60 Reviews


Points: 6395
Reviews: 60

Donate
Sun Apr 27, 2014 4:00 am
queerelves wrote a review...



Hey, Seb here for a review day review! I absolutely love your writing, and while I was reading this piece there really wasn't a single thing that stood out to me as bad.

You perfectly balanced description and action. You made sure to show instead of tell, but you didn't overuse adjectives or adverbs, your sentences weren't too long, you didn't have chunks of nothing but description... you wrote this very well!

After ten minutes, Donny slid his chair out and rummaged around in the rucksack he'd brought, producing a thick paper bound volume of about two hundred pages. He flipped open to where a page was bookmarked and had greasy food stains swarming around its text.


I think this partial paragraph is a good summary of your writing skills. In it, you described Donny's actions as well as the looks of his surroundings, and you do so without too many words or sentences. Your descriptions are short enough that they're to-the-point but long enough that they're actually descriptive.

The plot is amazing, and interesting, but it's the characters that really make this story. I love the characters. They act like real people, they talk like real people, they have depth like real people. I feel a connection to these characters because of how you wrote them.




ExOmelas says...


Thank you so much! :)



User avatar
557 Reviews


Points: 33593
Reviews: 557

Donate
Wed Apr 09, 2014 12:52 am
Ventomology wrote a review...



HELLO!
Very nice. I must say, this might be better than the last one.
There is very little to complain about, just some trivial little things.
First, why would a chemistry genius have trouble with ionic equations? From what I've seen, it's mostly just the dissection of a double or single-replacement reaction (often acid-base) with the dissolved bits written as ions instead of a whole molecule.
Also, during the bit where Donny is doubting Nanya's claim of Elsion, it would be nice to see his thoughts as he decides to believe her. It's a little sudden when he changes his mind so quickly.
This sentence: "Donny, Nanya and Cameron were the only fourth years on either of the teams and as such decided it best to peel away from what had ended up as a social gathering of the entire school – there were even sandwiches provided – and had begun the walk home." has a tense inconsistency. (That one's pretty hard to see... You used past tense before the extra note, and past perfect after it.)
Lastly, and this is my personal opinion, but the huge bit about her competing against the Gresham in the Vukuran Championships was a little too much. We already heard in the previous chapter that the Greshams are no good, and it's sort of implied anyway.
And... that's it. We get to do compliments now!
I see you took up on my request to see more sensory detail. Towards the end there's a little less action, but hey, the rest was TOTALLY COOL.
I really like the way the characters speak, especially Donny. He's so animated as a character, and that's a great way to turn him from the usual nerd cliche. The fact that so much slang and speech imperfections are used also really helps with flow and naturalness.
Well... I think that's it from me!
Ciao for now!





Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.
— Adrian Mitchell