Rising Shards

It was lights out in the dorms. Well, fifteen minutes to lights out in the regular parts of the dorms. Our floor, overseen by prefect and general pain Naomi Ratuna, had to turn lights off fifteen minutes early or face her wrath. We had some workarounds for this however that Naomi hadn’t gotten us for yet. Kalei did a trick she used at home to place some clothes near the door to block out any light we’d make. Once the shirts were in place, she got into bed and started playing on her eGame 3.

I was pretty beat and decided to sleep. I was usually the first to sleep lately, which brought out another part of my nights that was becoming routine.

“Zeta, gimme?” Oka asked. She was leaning over my bed with her hands clasped behind her.

I got the reading app open on my phone and handed it to Oka.

“Yay, thank you!” Oka said as she shuffled back to her bed.

“Better than that weird squiggly light thing you had for reading right?” Kalei asked.

“Have,” Oka scoffed. “I’m not getting rid of my official Pajama Lara Buttonfelt Night Reading Nightlight. It just needs batteries.”

Oka got comfy in bed as I started to drift off to sleep. Some nights it could be a pain to have Oka and Kalei stay up later than me, but that night I just felt safe and warm in my blankets, ready for a perfect night of sleep.

“Fang Fair’s tomorrow,” I mumbled as I got very cozy under my blankets. It’d be good to get a long night’s rest before the big day.

“Heh, Fang Fair,” Kalei said. “If you say it out loud it sounds kinda funny. Try it.”

“Fang Fair,” I said. “Hahah, it kinda does, yeah.”

“Fang Fair Fang Fair,” Oka said. “Fang Fair dang fair, heheheh.”

“Dang Fair,” Kalei said. “Dang that dang ol' dang Fang Fair.”

We were all giggling, which could be dangerous if Naomi Ratuna was prowling about. I thought about what Naomi would do for the Fang Fair. Probably some super fancy thing. Lillia’s would probably be really good. Which had me thinking about our presentation.

“Hey,” I said. “We did our Fang Fair presentation, right?”

The silence after I asked that was not comforting.

“….h-huh?” Oka said.

“What’d you just say?” Kalei asked.

“…We did our presentation, right?” I asked.

Oka bolted out of bed and ran to the front of the room where we piled our backpacks and assignments and stuff.

“Oh crap,” Oka said. “We have the cardboard foldy thing and…and that’s…that’s it.”

“That’s it?” I said. “That can’t be right.”

I was out of bed now too, and Kalei jumped down behind me.

Oka and I shhh’d her, and she froze in place with her hands out in front of her. We heard a footstep creaking outside in the hallway. If Naomi caught us then, we wouldn’t even have time to fix this. A few tense moments passed, and the footsteps continued on. We all sighed in relief, then inhaled again in panic because we completely blew off finishing our Fang Fair presentation.

“OK, so what do we have?” I whispered. “Let’s quickly brainstorm something in case we really really have nothing. We could…” I stammered, then grabbed my tail, which was flicking around from my sudden high stress level. “Tail…tails something…with tails, a thing about…Cani something…tail…tails!”

“You wanna try that one again?” Kalei asked.

“No.” I said.

“You don’t have to brainstorm, we have a topic at least,” Oka said, sifting through the part of the pile for Fang Fair. “Which is moondust stones. In addition to that, we have a few rough notes…the aforementioned cardboard foldy thing…an assignment sheet that says we need three pages of stuff…”

“And how much time do we have?” Kalei asked.

“It’s…right away in the morning tomorrow.” Oka said. "I think."

“Why didn’t we do this?” I asked. “We had so much time!”

“I thought it was next month,” Kalei said.

“I wanted to believe it was next month so bad that I convinced myself it was next month,” Oka said.

“I think I just didn’t want to,” I said.

“Well, whatever,” Kalei said. “We don’t have time to panic about this, let’s just get it done now. Each of us take a page of the presentation and an art thing. We don’t have time to think too much about it, just expand on the outline as much as you can. I’ll take the first page, Oka the second.”

“And me the third?” I asked.

“Zeta…you go stand over there.” Kalei said, pointing to the general area of our beds.

“What?” I hissed. “Shut up, I’m not gonna sit out of this.”

“You’re just gonna get in the way over here,” Kalei said. “I mean literally go work over there.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, let me grab some stuff at least.”

I kicked around in corner of the school stuff pile for anything useful.

“Hey, I have some art supplies left over from…something. Why did I keep all this?”

“Who cares? You’re on art too, go,” Kalei said.

With just a topic about moondust stones for each of us to take and somehow fill a whole page with, we split up and got to work.

“We have to work efficiently and quietly.” Oka reminded.

Kalei and I nodded.

I sat at the desk by our back window past the beds to write, and I filled my page with maybe too many sentences comparing moondust stones to moonlight. After rewriting my page to look more artsy and foldable cardboard thing ready, I got to work making some kind of art piece of a moondust stone. By this point, I realized I had no idea what a moondust stone was. But it was too late for me to stop to check.

The three of us worked through the night until sunrise, having some kind of completed board. None of us were sure it was quality, but it was done.

“Well, it’s done enough,” I said. “How much time do we have to sleep?”

“…Forty-three minutes.” Oka said.

“That’s like normal wakeup, how much time do we have to sleep in before this?”

“…Twenty-seven minutes.”

“Why is it less?”

“We might as well not even sleep.” Kalei said. “Just muscle through and crash sleep once we’re done.”

“I don’t think we really have a choice otherwise.” Oka said.

This was my first all-nighter. I felt less tired than I expected, but I was still riding the anxious wave.

“The key is to keep moving,” Kalei said. “I’ll go procure us some energy drinks or coffees or something. That is my quest. This questline is not as fun as the other new ones in Adventuring of Zup…but you get this great armor set if you finish all of the side quests on odd numbered days…”

Kalei continued to ramble about things from her video games as she shuffled off.

“I think the lack of sleep is getting to Kalei,” Oka said.

“I think she plays too many video games,” I said.