1 Flashdrive Claimed to Get Through the Great Firewall of Admin
Doesn’t work.
1 Dog Collar
Don’t ask.
1 Diploma, Folded Twice and Forgotten.
Sex, thievery, and memories . . . so me.
I threw the cokes and the booze in the fridge, put Ceinwyn’s portrait of Mom and Dad by the bedside, and tossed the rest back into the bags before throwing them into a cabinet drawer.
I went to the bathroom and took a shit. Pretty good shit. Top Quintile. Not having to share a communal bathroom with 13 other guys would be a plus. I wiped and flushed.
Too much information, kiddies?
I mean, you’re listening to a tape that’s forcing me to recall all this shit, but I’m the pervert. Right. I took a shower. I peed in the shower. What you gonna do about it? My shower, bitch! Maybe I even whacked one out. Maybe I even thought about your mom. Uh, yeah, Kiddy’s Mom, rub them MILF cankles together.
[CLICK]
I realize I might have crossed a line.
Let’s pretend that never happened.
[CLICK]
I made breakfast.
Best part of the whole prison cell apartment. Better than the bed and bathroom. Cafeteria is great, but they ain’t big on some stuff I like. Like a huge pan of chopped potatoes, salted, peppered, cooked in rosemary and garlic. And a whole packet of bacon.
Cuz bacon, bitch.
Even the faunamancers will eat bacon. They’ll hate themselves the whole time, Mancy telling them they’re being naughty, but they’ll eat it.
All this accomplished: unpacking, shitting, showering, whacking it, making breakfast, and eating breakfast.
Still had free time.
I got dressed and went for a walk.
Yeah, I was naked through the whole breakfast part. Other than one moment where I almost spilt bacon grease on my balls, I stand by the decision.
Weird shit goes down when you’re alone for the first time in four years, kiddies.
Best prepare.
Show me them cankles again, baby.
[CLICK]
I just sat there like a child at the zoo.
Watching all the strange animals eat and shit.
I think that’s what you do at a zoo, ain’t it?
There went Russell Quilt and Audrey Foster holding hands, Miss Foster with a nice sized diamond engagement ring gracing her finger. I gave Quilt a thumbs-up. He waved back, but led Miss Foster in an opposite direction. I will not be denied my promised bachelor party, sir! Strippers will be watched! Booze will be drunk! Asylum or not!
There went Jethro Smith, favorite skull in his hand to terrify his new Ultra Single class with. Rainbow Greenbrier with a huge bag of art supplies, big thick prismatic glasses over her eyes. Keith Gullick with a potted plant, smiling at every student and teacher that crossed his path. Mordecai Root with a Construct trailing behind him, who had never forgiven me for outsmarting him during the whole Staff of Rebirth fiasco my first year—which maybe I stole and maybe I didn’t.
Right, kiddies?
It was weird watching them all. All those years with seven to eight teachers a go and now . . . only one. This Plutarch fucker who had been hiding from me for four years. Hadn’t seen him at a single event, not even Winter Wars. Could’ve been a ghost, was at least a hermit. Not sure what I expected. Knew he was old. In the Lady and Fines Samson generation of the Asylum. The Old Guard. Been keeping the place running for a long time.
After that came the generation that got hit hard by the Counter-Culture War, then all the peace babies like Ceinwyn and the Welfs and my main mad scientist Boris Hunting. Funny thing about mancers is that we either live to be ancient or we have very short lives. Not a whole lot of in-between.
Don’t think I’ll be one of the ones who make one-hundred.
Think I’ll be one of the ones lucky to see thirty.
Figure someone will eventually get sick of my shit and stomp me out.
Gonna be a whole lot of fun when the moment finally comes.
Guess the thing me and the ones who don’t live very long all have in common is that we look forward to the moment that stomps us out too much.
Ain’t about dying.
About living.
Or maybe I’ve just been too long without a good fight. Winter War’s nine months gone and there wouldn’t be another one for me. My life was just . . . artifacts now. The Guild . . .
I scowled at the plants and trees of the Park.
Plutarch might be a teacher, but he was Guild too. All Artificers of the West and most of the East are Guild. Some Harvey Dent shit there: better to die young than to live long enough to be a crusty old hermit.
A class of Ultras came through. Singles.
Quite a few of them recognized me and waved.
Kids I’d met during the roadtrip. Here at the Asylum. In their colors.
Weird.
Then I noticed the woman ushering them along from behind, face angry, annoyed she was forced into the task: Teresa Garcia. One of the Three Queens.
I stood up as she passed.
No one sat around the Three Queens. It made you seem too weak and the weak got victimized. Bitches should’ve been expelled by now.
I try not to call women ‘bitches’ nowadays—since they like to set me on fire and papercut my left ass cheek if I do—but those three deserve every letter. Teresa felt the same about me. So did Mary O’Connell and Catherine Hayes, ever since I told them ‘no’ about their plan to expel Welf.
If anyone is gonna expel Welf then it’s me . . . and what would be the fun if he wasn’t around to torment occasionally?
“Foul Mouth,” Teresa greeted me. “Sizing up fourteen-year-olds to club over the head and drag back to your cave?”
I showed her my teeth.
She smirked back. “You bite me and I’ll burn you, little toad.”
Teresa was one of those pyromancers who loves to burn things. Most pyromancers are just quick to a temper or fast to a decision, while the best you got were stars like Valentine Ward . . . but in that dark bit . . . well, some of them like to burn things. Whatever hung around: paper, black market cigarettes, even a fellow’s ballsack whether he called them a ‘bitch’ or not.
Quite a few of the Blackjacks had burn marks on them, though those boys were so twisted around the Three Queens’ fingers they’d never complained to a teacher about it. One more year and they’re all gone.
“Know the only good thing about you three bitches being student-advisors, Teresa?” I asked her.
“More minds to sculpt?” she mockingly guessed, hand reaching out to touch a hydromancer girl on the arm, who flinched away.
“You ain’t so scary without Catherine and Mary lined up beside you,” I told her. I grabbed her hand and yanked it away from the girl. “All them Blackjacks are busy too. Just you . . . all alone.”
She snatched her arm back, hissing at me. “Keep talking, Foul Mouth, we’ll make you a priority before we graduate.”
I turned away from her, towards the new class of Singles. “She ever hurts any of you, then you tell a teacher right away. Can’t find a teacher who will listen to you? Then come to me. I’ll take care of her.”
Teresa hissed again. Sounded like boiling water. “Priority it is.”
“Better than you hurting them,” I told her.
“Move!” she screeched at the class. “You’re already late!”
I watched her go, feeling good about the day. Don’t like bullies after all. Ain’t a hero, but sometimes a brother has to be a little loud to make sure he’s the one gets whipped that night, not his sisters.
Ain’t a white knight.
Just a troll.
[CLICK]
“Fucking joke, that’s what this is,” I repeated for about the twentieth time.
The classroom was all mine at the moment.
The brats wouldn’t show up for another five minutes.
It was one of the oldest rooms at the
Asylum, on the original floor of the classroom building. I talk about buildings at the Asylum, but for the classroom buildings and Admin and even the Library they’re more like compartmentalized neighborhoods of their own. You can get lost in there, really easy.
Some parts of the school have been rebuilt, like many of the dorms, including the Ultra dorms. But never the classrooms. Just a palimpsestic mess scraped away and added right on top of one another, be it a new wing, a basement, or a whole floor.
I’d never been in that room before.
I don’t think.
I mean . . . I could’ve snuck into it and had sex with Val or something, but we usually did that when it was super dark out, so . . . I didn’t recognize any of it at least. Old, old, old. Even had chalkboards still. There was a map of the world with the USSR on it. Huh.
As an Ultra, I’d only ever been in four of the mundane classrooms. History, Languages, Science, Mathematics. Or Ambrose, Smith, Slaton, and Dingle. Same four rooms for four years. The time of the morning we had our classes at rotated year to year, but the rooms were always the same.
Not so for Intras, I guess.
Huh, I thought again.
I picked up a packet on the teacher’s desk. There was a note: I forgot to give these to you for study during the vacation. I’m sure you’ll do fine, regardless. Don’t let me down, Ceinwyn.
“Oh look . . . the teachers have a bet going on how I’ll do,” I deadpanned to the empty room.
I flipped through the packet. History Course Teacher Guidebook. Graduate Student Do’s and Don’ts. Roll Call List. I pulled out the guidebook and leafed through it. American History. Not USA History. American. Both continents. “Crap, crap, more crap,” I grumbled, “gonna need to steal some Howard Zinn from the Library.”
I threw the Do’s and Don’ts in the trash.
Picked up the roll call and studied it.
Bi’s.
Bi’s are okay.
Not too stupid, not too sure of themselves.
They’d know me too.
Hard to be at the Asylum and not know King Henry Price. The Foul Mouth. Thanks, Welf. All your snide remarks over the school grounds to any receptive ear and all you did was make me infamous, you douchebag.
The roll call had the students’ class rank next to each of them. Not top of the class, but pretty good. Sixty-one to ninety actually. Discounting the top Ultras, that made them the second best students of their year. Must mean we got our class based on our own graduating class rank. Or maybe not. I mean, if you did the math it was pretty obvious that there weren’t enough Ultra graduates at the school to cover all the Intra classes for each of the four subjects. We just supplemented the teacher pool.
Or take the Heps being student-advisors, sure the Ultra classes each get an advisor to themselves, but with Intras they share an advisor between two or three classes. So . . .
I rubbed my forehead.
Math.
I don’t approve of it.
History.
Least I could rewrite some of the bullshit.
Picking up a piece of chalk, I pooled anima and waited for the kiddies to show up.
[CLICK]
“BLAM, second they’re all in their seats I smash the chalk into the chalkboard and I’m manipulating it so it’s a list of cuss words that are okay to say in the classroom. Never seen so much blushing in my life. I mean what fifteen-year-old hasn’t heard of a rimjob before?” I asked to Pocket and Jesus’ laughter.
Raj, as always, only rolled his eyes. “First day and you’re already on the edge of being brought before the Lady for punishment.”
“For what?”
“For perverting the younger generation?”
It was lunch for us. Ultra graduate lunch. Another sign we’d grown up since we had the whole Cafeteria to ourselves with only two other classes, Ultra ’08 with Leo and Sabine and company, then Ultra ’07 with the Three Queens and accompanying Blackjacks. A few teachers too, but less than a hundred people in all. Made the Cafeteria seem deserted.
“Perverted? It’s not like I showed them Hitler fucking Stalin in the ass, did I?”
Raj’s jaw dropped a little bit.
“I thought about it,” I admitted.
He just shook his head. Raj was one of the few kids in our class who had physically changed the most over the years. Turban was the same, facial structure was fine and long as always, but over the last four years he’d grown in a beard, since Sikhs don’t shave. It wasn’t full on man-mode, but also wasn’t scraggly. Never shaving made for fine, delicate beard hair. Don’t know if it provided him any extra wisdom, but he had abandoned the idea that he could turn me into a polite, respectable human being if he just committed fully to the effort. “I suppose I should take it as an improvement that you decided against the idea.”
“Sure, if that makes you feel better,” I teased him before turning to Pocket and Jesus. “So . . . how many bikini beach babe pussies did each of you fine hunters bag? Give me the details!”
I heard a sniff from down the table. I glanced at Miranda, sitting with Val, Athir, and Isabel looking far too much like a bikini beach babe herself for Prince Henry’s comfort. “Quit snooping,” I told Miranda.
Miranda glared back from behind a pair of thick glasses. Unlike Raj, she’d never abandoned the idea that I needed a vast attitude improvement. “Quit being so loud I can’t help but overhear the obscenities.”
Val smiled at the bickering like an understanding sibling. “Nice to know that no matter how old we get, some things just don’t change.”
Val. Didn’t like feeling uncomfortable around her, but I did. Still wasn’t over the last breakup. Booze and hillbilly crabs or not. I turned back to Jesus and Pocket again, pleading with them, “Tell me it was double digits!”
Jesus held up four fingers. Pocket only one.
“Woe is me to have friends so weak with the Slut-Fu!” I complained.
“So is everyone excited to meet their new teacher?” Raj attempted to swerve the conversation away from Slut-Fu.
“One!” I accused Pocket. “One!”
“Quality over quantity, dude.”
“Lies!”
Jesus laughed at me, stepping in. “So if Miss Boomworm walked over here and gave you try number three, you’d just go on with the hillbilly whoring?” Raj and Pocket both gave him the cut-it sign before he pressed farther on the sore button. Jesus shook his head at them. “Pocket finds someone he likes that first week and stays with them, what’s the problem, El Rey?”
“Nothing, I guess,” I grumbled. It’s a good thing Pocket looked like Pocket, six-foot-plus of All American Hunk, and that I didn’t, or I’d have humped myself to death from all the pussy being thrown at me. Yup, I’m disgusting. But honest. “She shows up at the Asylum and you two start singing and dancing ‘bout Summer Nights and our friendship is over.”
Pocket grinned. “Not a singer, got no problem there.”
I smacked Raj on the shoulder. “What about you?”
“Excuse me?”
“They have women in Oregon, right? I met one on my trip with Ceinwyn in fact. Would’ve had her number, but then a fairy dragged me into the river. Ain’t fair, man.”
“A fairy—”
“Forget about that,” I interrupted before I had to tell them about all the Max Lamont crap, there’d be time for that tonight, now I just wanted to joke around and forget about my approaching meeting with Plutarch. “Oregon ladies, they exist?”
“Well . . . I spent most of my time with my family, but there were a couple of weddings I went to and those can get . . . they can be nice, and I met a nice girl there and . . . what?”
I shook my head at him. “Stay away from weddings, that’s pussy with strings attached.”
“But—”
“Nope, rookie mistake. Don’t go after women when they’re near a wedding. Horrible idea.”
Jesus and Pocket both nodded. “It is known.”
“But Wedding Crashers�
��” Raj tried to say.
“You use your real name?” I asked.
“Well, of course.”
I shook my head. “That one’s gonna hound you for a decade.”
“Couple more hours until we’re in the shit,” Pocket said to save Raj from his confusion. “Ultra training, dudes, the Big Time is here.”
“Mega fern-throwing?” I teased him.
Pocket nodded at me like a challenge glove had been thrown. “One day there will be a strange ficus in your room and it’s going to try to kill you, just warning you.”
“Who’s even teaching you? Jesus has Wolfgang Welf von Wolfenstein, I got the hermit, who do you two have to put up with?”
“Rin Yukimura,” Raj said. “I met her when you burned down the Mound.”
I scowled. “I take that shit from other people, but you know who was really responsible.”
“But we all know you put her up to it,” Pocket reminded me, “and I got Leslie Van Houten. Don’t know anything about her other than she’s Dutch.”
I brightened up at this information.
“No, I will not ask her to grow you some pot,” Pocket smashed my dreams.
I dimmed. “Probably just grows tulips anyway.”
Raj smiled under his beard. “Sometimes he makes a witty historical joke and I forgive him for all the fart and penis ones.”
Which was such a great opening that I just couldn’t help myself. “Yeah, tomorrow I’m definitely going with Hitler banging Stalin on the chalkboard.”
Session 146
King Henry’s Nerd Nirvana.
So sayeth the sign.
Doing it my fucking way this time around. Ain’t got no Auntie Badass over my shoulder, means things got to be different than before . . . some of them good, some of them a pain in the ass, but change, ain’t it the natural state of a healthy life? All them girl magazines I used to steal for Sally told me so, it must be true.
Change. Thought change was good before the Dumpening, but we’ll get back to that in a second, let’s play some catch up on the last three months before we dive into my rediscovered love of alcohol and being a mopey, emo, heartbroken bastard to all around me, especially business partners and school chums.
The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 4
