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Michael Carell looked up at the sign that proclaimed “LANCASTER ELEMENTARY SCHOOL”, and sighed.
It was to be his first day as the new fourth grade teacher, and he couldn't help but feel apprehensive. Sure, he loved teaching, and he loved kids, but his last teaching job had ended with him getting run out of town. He knew that what happened was bad and entirely his fault, but it left him with the feeling that he was just a ticking time bomb who would inevitably screw up again.
Lancaster seemed like a nice town. It had its quirks, like how the people brought their recycling out to the street instead of using trash chutes, and how there wasn’t a 15 foot wall going all the way around the edge to keep the preters out. Despite that, Lancaster seemed to Michael like the kind of place where a guy could start over. Which was good, because that was exactly what he needed to do.
He walked into the school and down the eerily quiet hall. Clearly, he had let his nerves get the best of him a bit too long, and the students were in their classrooms by now.
He found his classroom -- fourth door on the right -- and heard the sound of kids chattering happily on the other side. For a moment, he was back in his hometown, surrounded by children screaming in fear as they were hounded by little flying creatures…
Michael blinked, and he was back in the empty hallway.
Can't live in the past, he thought to himself. You can do this.
He took a deep breath, and then walked into the room.
“Hello, class,” he said to the crowd of children, interrupting the noisy blur of the room.
The chattering students fell silent, probably nervous to meet a new teacher. This was something he could handle. He could be friendly, he could be a good teacher. He'd trained for this, even if it got him nothing but misfortune.
“My name is Mr. -” he started. He looked up at the class, and froze.
Splattered in the middle of a sea of ordinary-looking students was a bright orange blob that kind of looked like a human and kind of looked like a fox. Michael’s jaw dropped. A kitsune.
What was it doing here? Creatures like it weren't allowed to live in human society, not since President Chancellor declared it a waste of tax dollars. He remembered watching the announcement on the news, sitting with his parents and feeling the collective pride of the town where the president was born and grown. It was a great day for the country, and without it, he’d feel a lot less safe being forced to move away from his hometown.
His mind raced. He was right about there being something strange about this town: they were harboring an illegal preter! This was ridiculous; if this preter was going to attend a school with humans, why wouldn't it disguise itself somehow? For it to just be out in the open like this was practically an invitation for trouble.
This was big, bigger than he could have expected. If he turned this creature in, he'd be protecting a town of innocent humans from exposure to an unpredictable beast. He'd be rewarded handsomely, he'd be a hero, he might even be able to restore his name in his hometown...
A cough interrupted Michael’s fantasies. The whole class was staring at him: their new teacher who had walked in, started to introduce himself, and cut off mid-sentence. He wondered if the kit had noticed him staring, or if the look on its face just mirrored the confusion of its classmates.
Okay, Michael, you can save this.
“Whoops!” Michael tripped himself, collapsing to the floor with a comical yelp. The class broke out into laughter. Good.
“Now, now, settle down!” he said amicably, getting back up. He picked up the couple sheets of paper that had gone flying, and sat at the teacher’s desk.
“That's enough comedy for the day, don't you think?” He smiled, and a few kids protested. “Settle down, now. Let's get back to class, shall we? I was just about to introduce myself. My name is Mr. Carell. I come from a place called Milquetoast, Florida --- yes, just like milk and toast put together --- and I'm very excited to be your new teacher!”
“Hi Mr. Carell!” the class sang in chorus, including the preter. He flinched at the thought of that creature addressing him, but recovered quickly.
“Now that you know who I am, let me get to know all of you,” he said, picking up the class attendance sheet. “When I call your name, please raise your hand and tell me something about yourself. Abigail.”
A hand in the front row shot up. “Here, present, here I'm here Mr. Carell!” called the curly-haired redhead. “I'm Abigail and I like pasta!”
“Thank you Abigail, it's nice to meet you,” Michael responded, smiling. “Aija.”
“Here,” mumbled the girl adjacent to Abigail. Ah, they were seated in alphabetical order. “My interesting fact about myself is that I'm not from Asia even though that's what my name sounds like.”
“Very good, Aija, it's nice to meet you. Carter.”
It went on like that for a while, and Michael tried his best to remember how the names matched to faces. The fun facts mattered a little less, and to be honest he could do without a boy named Ethan telling him that he once killed a hummingbird. He might've thought to keep that in mind when he'd inevitably end up talking to the boy’s parents, but he was too distracted by the next student in the seating order.
“I'm here,” said the kit, raising its hand. “It's pronounced Felicity, like feh-lih-cih-tee. My fun fact is that my house has a rainbow mailbox and I think it's cool.”
Michael ground his teeth as he responded. “It's nice to meet you, Felicity.”
He finished going through the class roster, and then started his day's lesson. It was relaxing for him, to be back in his element, but he could feel the kit's eyes burning into him every time he turned his back. And if it was distracting him, it had to be distracting the students too, right?
Then again, these kids had probably grown up around creatures like this. They didn't know better. They might even be upset if he did anything about it. For all he knew, this whole community was a bunch of preter-lovers. They might not look at it as him saving the town, not the way that they would have back in Milquetoast.
So for now, he'd just watch and wait. That preter wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, so he'd have all the time he needed to figure out how he was going to do this. In the meantime, he needed to learn more about what was going on with this town, and how a creature like that was going to a public school in the first place.
Lunch time came, and the teachers were supposed to supervise the playing children. So, he found himself outside, leaning against the building with the other teachers, eating the sandwich he'd packed for the day. Most of the kids were rough housing about as much as he'd expect, except for...
“Hey,” he said, nudging the woman next to him. She was the first grade teacher, Mrs. Parsnip or something like that. She looked up from the cup of coffee she was nursing. “What's the deal with...” He trailed off, and pointed in the direction of the group of students sitting around a table.
“Oh, yeah. They're a bit odd, aren't they?” She chuckled lightly. “They never play around at lunch, they just sit at their table and talk. They call themselves the Lunch Bunch, isn't that cute? Most of them are mine, but Felicity is one of yours, isn't she?”
Michael gulped. “Yeah, she is.” He stared at the five of them, who were talking intently and, more impressively, seemingly without interrupting each other. “Why do you think she only hangs out around first graders?”
Mrs. Parsnip shrugged. “Who really could say what goes on in a nine year old's head? I'm just glad to see that she finally made some friends. She seemed pretty lonely last year; picture the Lunch Bunch, sitting around that table, but just her. Isn't that sad?"
There was a beat, and Michael realized the other teacher was looking at him oddly. "Maybe it is a bit," he forced himself to say. "Maybe it is."
Mrs. Parsnip shrugged again, and went back to her coffee. Michael kept watching the Lunch Bunch. There was something odd about them, he was sure of it, and it wasn't just that they seemed willing to befriend a preter. That part was understandable -- children are impressionable, and in a town like this, they likely never had anyone warn them about such creatures. But the way they were behaving had a bizarre quality to it, as if they were talking about something far more important than their lunch.
As he watched, the girl sitting next to the kit turned her head and looked directly at him.
Michael flinched, and dropped his sandwich. He heard Mrs. Parsnip beside him snort, and he grumbled as he bent over to pick it up. When he looked back at the Lunch Bunch, the girl was still staring at him. Feeling uncomfortable all of a sudden, he excused himself, and went to throw out his food.
When Michael arrived home, he locked his front door and leaned against it. He'd held in his anxiety all day, and now that he was home it was safe to let it out. He didn't want to admit it but he was so scared seeing that preter in his class, even though it was just a child and he was an adult. He knew from experience that a creature being smaller than you didn't mean it couldn't hurt you.
He slid down the door to sit on the floor, and tried to regulate his breathing. In… and out. In… and out. Blindly panicking wasn't going to solve anything. The smart thing to do would be to find out what he was dealing with. He reached up to the table next to the door and grabbed his communicator device.
“Hello?” The scowl on the speaker’s face was audible.
“Hey Darrell,” Michael said.
“What do you want, Mikey?” his brother asked.
“Oh, you know, just checking in on the family…” Michael responded as innocently as possible.
“Mikey, you know Mom and Dad don't want to talk to you.”
Michael frowned. “I- I know, but…”
“But what? What could you possibly...” His brother’s voice trailed off. A moment passed, and Michael could hear his brother let out a long exhale.
“Ok,” Darrell said, sounding calmer. “Sorry. It’s been rough here and you’re an easy scapegoat.”
Michael winced. “What’s wrong? I thought living in the president’s hometown would be a big deal.”
“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t like Gunda. People who didn’t get to grow up in a safe preter-free environment like we did. People who don’t get what she’s working to achieve. Would’ve thought you’d come across some people like that by now.”
Michael thought back to how calm all of his students were today. “Well, now that you bring it up…”
“Oh no, Mikey,” Darrell interrupted, sounding as if he was scolding a small child. “Don’t you tell me you’re living with a bunch of Transcendence hippy preter lovers.”
Michael’s anxiety started to tick back up. “It’s not like that! I got a job as a fourth grade teacher, and the town seemed respectable enough, so I took it, and-”
“What, you wanted to ‘educate’ the kids, so you found a pixie and brought it in, and now a swarm of its friends are destroying the town?”
Michael saw the mason jar in his hand, saw the pixie stumble about inside. He saw the confused faces of his class before the room started to shake. He heard the windows shatter and watched as hundreds of tiny glowing pests swarmed in. He watched the kids scream, some of them managing to get away and some of them getting caught in the onslaught. There was so much screaming and it all fed directly into his ears. He doubled over in pain, and the jar slipped out of his hands, and-
“Mikey? You here?”
Michael blinked, and he was in his apartment again. His brain felt like it had just trudged through 100 feet of snow. “Darrell, what were we talking about?”
There was a sigh. “We were talking about you living with preters.”
“Oh, shoot, that was it. I was trying to tell you there’s a kitsune in my class.”
“Mikey, no!” Darrell responded, sounding exasperated. Michael ground his teeth a bit -- being called ‘Mikey’ was getting irritating. “Ain’t you dirtied our family name enough by now? I’m starting to think Mom and Dad were right.”
Now it was Michael’s turn to scowl. “Right about what, Dare?”
“They said one of these days you were gonna get yourself killed hanging around preters. Now I find out you’re living with them? Can’t believe it.”
“How was I supposed to know?” Michael spat. “I’m calling you because I need help! I want to know how to get rid of this thing, and I thought who knows better about dealing with preters than the town of Milquetoast?”
“Clean up your own mess, Mikey.” Darrell’s voice was suddenly very calm, and something about it set Michael on edge. “We’re still cleaning up your last mess here at home.”
There was a click, and then silence.
Michael put his communicator on his lap, and looked up. The otherwise plain visage of the ceiling was strangely blurry. He knew his family would still be upset with him, but it’s one thing to know that, and another to hear it in his brother’s voice. Would he ever actually be able to do enough to gain his family’s forgiveness?
He wiped his eyes, and got to his feet. He wasn’t at home anymore. It was time to stop acting like it.
Michael settled into his new job with more ease than he expected. Most of the students seemed genuinely interested in learning, even if there were a few incidents here and there. He loved those moments when he could see the light turn on in a student's head and the thing he was teaching finally made sense to them. It wasn't a high paying job, it wasn't glamorous work, but darn it, it was rewarding.
It was, it really was, but...
Even on good days, he could never take his mind off of the kitsune. How could he? It had bright orange fur and sat almost in the center of the room. He tried to ignore it, tried to mentally treat it as just a big splotch of color in his vision, but for some reason it kept wanting to be treated like a student.
It raised its hand (paw?) pretty often, and Michael had to pretend like he couldn't see it. He didn't want it taking away learning opportunities from natural human students. Whenever he did have to call on it, it answered in the velvety tone of a grown woman, and Michael had to hide his disgust at something so unnatural and impure cavorting around the children.
Speaking of the children, Michael was keeping an eye on the kit's so-called friends, too. Even if there didn't end up being anything intrinsically odd about them, he still wanted to be able to protect them from the kit when the time arrived.
The dark-skinned girl with poofy hair was named Lucy, and the others seemed to follow her around like she was their leader despite the fact that she was easily the smallest of them. The tall boy was named Andy, and though he seemed fairly normal, his voice occasionally slipped into a deep register that was shocking to hear from such a young kid. There was another boy named Derek, but everyone seemed to call him Ziggy for some reason. Michael didn't know what that boy's deal was, other than the fact that he always got a dreadful chill when they crossed paths.
And lastly, the girl who had been staring at him on his first day was named Lane. That hadn't been an isolated incident -- Michael almost always found her looking at him when he was on lunch duty. There was something incredibly ominous about that stare, something in those big gray eyes that suggested she knew more than she let on. She acted the least like a child of the bunch of them -- while Lucy and Derek were yelling at each other, while Andy was attempting to mediate between them, while the kit was giggling like a loon, Lane just sat there with a blank look on her face.
There was something there, he was sure of it. But those curious thoughts were reserved for his good days. On his bad days?
It was a public school; there were plenty of them. When a fire drill interrupted art time, he had to carry three screaming paint-covered fourth graders out into the rain. When a stomach bug went around and three kids threw up on their desks (and one threw up on their neighbor), he had to bring them to the nurse, console the remaining children, call parents, even help clean up the vomit. When Ethan failed a math test and his mother came storming into parent-teacher night with teeth bared to kill, Michael had to call the deepest reserves of his patience and found himself wanting.
And through this all, the kitsune creature sat there, tantalizingly out of reach. It was on his bad days that he revisited the idea he had when he first stepped into the classroom. The town might’ve thought it was some sort of safe haven, but all it would take for that to change would be one visit from the Preternatural Displacement Agency, and then he'd be a hero again...
And yet? As the days dragged on, and the town shifted into winter, the thought of his social status being restored started to be eclipsed by... something more grand. Due to his upbringing, he tended to stay away from ridiculous myths about nasty preters, but his fixation on this blemish in his classroom led him to do some research. Better to know one's enemies, from how much danger they are to you, to how much danger you can be to them. It was hard to know what to trust, as the MagiWeb was a fountain of knowledge larger and more untrustworthy than most demons, but half-asleep at 3am, the mind doesn't really care about trustworthiness.
It cares about power.
So, those half-baked thoughts circled him in the classroom. Look at it . Ask the class a question. It's too good to be true . Stop the Baker twins from fighting. There's so much more than this . Hand out some sock puppets. Don't you know that the tail of a kitsune extends your lifespan?
It all happened so fast. One moment he was teaching the class about landforms, and the next moment he was following a fourth grader home.
It was pathetically easy to kidnap it. It didn't take the bus for whatever reason, and walked through an empty section of the park on its way home. A swift kick to the head knocked it out. Some handy rope and bandage kept it quiet in case it woke up. And the MagiTek orb he had saved up for allowed him to transport it without even having to carry it.
That had been the easy part. The hard part was what to do with the creature. He'd called his brother the night before, hoping to catch him in a better mood than last time.
"Mikey, this is ridiculous. No one here is gonna help you cut off a kitsune's tail."
"Screw them, then. This is big, Darrell, and I can let you in on it if you just help me out."
"Don't bother. I'll tell you what I know, but I don't want any part of this."
Michael found himself in the basement of city hall, in front of a door that was unremarkable other than the fact that it had been completely invisible until he used a Revealing Spell on his MagiTek orb. On the other side of the door was an extremely long and mostly dark hallway. According to his brother, tunnels like this had been used for years to transport illegal goods.
He shut the door behind him, and started walking. It was going to be a long walk, and the long patches of darkness between overhead lights were giving him the creeps. It was cold in the hall, but he was flushed with anxiety over what he was doing. He felt the orb in his hand slip a couple of times, but he always caught it before it hit the ground.
It was going to be okay. He'd make it a couple of towns over to a place where pro-nat witchcraft was practiced. He'd meet up with the contact that his brother had provided. And then everything he'd been dreaming about for the past few months would come to pass. It was, as he said, going to be okay. He just had to keep telling himself that, or he'd break down completely.
Then, he heard a voice; a voice so quiet it was not even a whisper, might even have only been his imagination. The kitsune brat was still gagged and unconscious, so it couldn't have said anything. The light above him flickered, and it occurred to him just how dark the unlit sections of the hallway were. He couldn't see anyone now, but that didn't mean they weren't there...
Again, he heard the voice, or something akin to a voice. It was barely an itch on his consciousness but he couldn't shake it, couldn't convince himself he was just hearing things.
Hello Mister Carell.
The utterance was devoid of tone and cadence, and was so slight that the speaker had to have been standing right behind him. He swiveled round, and found the hallway, or at least what he could see of it, as empty as ever.
"Who's there?" he called out. "Show yourself!"
His voice echoed down the passageway before him, seeming to go on for miles -- just how long was this tunnel anyway? When the hall was once again silent, he shrugged. It must be his nerves. This wasn't exactly something you do everyday. Nor did he want it to be. In and out, he just had to finish this up and be on his merry way. He took a step forward.
Further down the hall, a light flickered on.
Michael froze. There was someone else here. His heart started pounding like a MagiHammer. Everything was over, he would be caught, his teaching license torn up, any chance of redemption he had completely dashed...
Except... He squinted, then rubbed his glasses with his shirt and looked again just to be sure. There was a person standing in the light up ahead, but they looked so small, almost like a kid.
It was a kid. It had to be. They even looked familiar. Could it be?
"Lane?" he called, stepping into the shadow. "Lane Douglas? Is that you?"
Hello Mister Carell.
That voice again, so close and tiny it could be inside his head. Was it her? He thought back, and realized he'd never actually heard her speak before.
"What are you doing down here, Lane?" he asked, starting to run. Some small part of him in the back of his mind noted that the light behind him had gone out, but he mostly ignored that. He was too worried about Lane -- this was no place for children, and she seemed disoriented, standing there with her head slightly tilted and a blank expression on her face. Good thing he found her...
A lump formed in Michael's throat and he stopped dead. He looked down at the inky darkness concealing his hands, and saw the occasional blinking light from the MagiTek orb he was clasping. He thought of the bound and unconscious kitsune floating next to him -- no, he couldn't let Lane see that.
Why did you hurt her ?
The blood drained from Michael's face. Lane was only about 20 feet away now, so he could see her pretty clearly, and her lips did not move. Someone else was here.
There was a clanging sound from above, like something crawling through an air vent. Michael gasped, and dashed forward. He heard a snarl, and the clanging followed after him. This was not good. It didn't matter if Lane saw what he'd done to her friend -- it was his duty as a teacher to protect her from whatever else was here.
But I'm already safe.
Michael skidded on the ground, confusion outpacing fear for a critical split-second. His mind scrambled to try to process what had just happened, and came up with nothing. Ten feet away, Lane rolled her head to the other side of her neck.
"La-" Michael started, and then something fell on him.
It was some sort of creature, with the general shape of a short human, although it was hard to make out details in the dark, and given the fact that it was scrabbling madly at his face and hair. Michael screamed, and dropped the MagiTek orb. He was dimly aware of it rolling away, but he was a little preoccupied with the monster attacking him. He tried to just grab it and throw it off, but his arms wouldn't listen to him.
He tried the next best thing, which was throwing himself into the wall, crushing the monster in between the wall and himself. Unfortunately, it seemed like his attacker had expected this, and jumped out of the way just in time, leaving Michael to faceplant directly into concrete.
He moaned in pain and fell to the floor. Something -- probably the creature that had attacked him -- came up from behind and somehow tied his arms in a knot behind his back. Through the pain, Michael could only think of one thing, and it wasn't his own life, or even the kitsune. It was that he was unable to save Lane.
I already told you...
Lane walked forward, the light above her moving as she did, keeping her illuminated. She stood directly before him, and looked down with a look in her eyes that struck terror into his heart.
I'm already safe.
Michael screamed again, a guttural wail that rocked the empty hallway. Something was happening to his mind, it felt like something was being wrenched out of him, and it hurt worse than getting eleven teeth pulled at once. He didn't know what was going on, didn't know who this girl was or what had attacked him, what the point of any of this was, all he knew was it felt like his world was being pulled out of his eye-sockets, and...
Seems like mom and dad were right, after all.
"That's enough, Lane," a young voice called out.
The pain stopped. Michael fell flat to the floor, panting. What was it now?
A familiar dark-skinned girl, a little smaller than Lane, stepped into the light. What was her name, Lucy or something?
"I'll take it from here."
The girl grinned, flashing a pair of razor sharp fangs, and Michael, well.
Michael screamed.
The playground was abuzz at lunch the next day.
"Did you hear? Mr. Carell didn't come in today."
"No fair! Why do the fourth graders get a day off but not us?"
Lucy Ann smiled into her cup of "fruit punch". You could always trust kids to comically miss the point.
The Lunch Bunch were only four today. The school got an unsettling call in the morning from Felicity’s parents saying that she had been both abducted and found last night, and needed time to recover. Pair that with the fact that the fourth grade teacher had gone missing, and the administration didn't seem too sensationalist for wondering if they should close the school for a couple of days while this was looked into.
Unfortunately, neither case seemed likely to reveal anything. Felicity claimed she was unconscious from the time she was abducted until she woke up on her parents' doorstep. And no trace of Mr. Carell had been found yet.
After all, it seemed a pity to let any of him go to waste.
"So, what did we learn from Carell?" Lucy Ann asked the other three, with the air of a teacher giving a pop quiz.
Andy snorted. "We learned that he's terrible at planning. How did he think he wasn't going to get caught?"
Lucy Ann shook her head. "Lane was telling us that from day one. Next?"
Ziggy stood up, practically frothing at the mouth. "We learned that he's a pro-nat racist piece of garbage that should never have been allowed to be placed near children!"
"That's closer," Lucy Ann said, smirking. "You might want to fix your eyes, Ziggy."
He froze, and sat back down. "Was I showing?"
"Yeah, you bozo. You know we're not really safe anywhere, even at school. Look at what literally just happened."
Ziggy grumbled, and started poking himself in the head.
"What we learned," Lucy Ann continued, ignoring this, "is that Mr. Carell is from the same town as President Chancellor. Lane did an excellent job of digging into them. They even knew each other growing up, didn't they?"
Lane, blank faced as ever, nodded at the vampire.
"I love jumping into a battle with fangs bared," Lucy Ann said, "but we're going to need as much intel as we can get for this one. Mr. Carell may have been another average shithead that was easier to pick off than a scab on a hemophiliac, but he was just a stepping stone for our real job."
Ziggy looked up and grinned, exposing a few too many teeth. Andy rolled his eyes but then joined in with a gruff laugh. Even the edges of Lane's mouth wiggled up into a slight smile.
"We're fucking coming for you, President Chancellor."
Lucy Ann took another sip of her drink. Delicious.