Chapter 4 - Chapter 4

Chapter four
I chewed my eggs thoughtfully and stared at the note sitting on the table.
Allison,
I trust you have had a
restful sleep. I apologize
for our lead council member.
He was very blunt. I will be
starting to teach you today.
All of the girls
have to wear knee-length white
dresses in world. You will
find a few in the wardrobe
by the wall. If you are hungry
then you may go to the feast
that is held in the Great Hall.
Just go outside and ask
where it is located. The towns
people will be happy to assist you,
I’m sure.
I will meet you outside of your
apartment after you have dined.
Goodbye.
-First Council Member

Do these people not have names or something? Pushing the note away, I continued to eat. There was no way I was going out there to eat with all of the people I had broken down in front of last night. I was curious as to what kind of war training I would be getting. Would I have to have lessons with all seven of the Council Members? I hoped not. If the first one’s note reflected all of their personalities, I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy this. I probably wouldn’t enjoy this even if they were the most exciting people in the world. This was going to end in death.
Second death.
Whatever.
I was too worried to care about logic.
I heard a knock on the door.
Oh no. Here we go.
“Come in.” I heard myself saying. The curtain covering the front door parted and in came–
“Buzz?!” I jumped up in astonishment.
“Hi Allison!” She sang, skipping over to the white table and sitting on it.
“Where did you go yesterday? Why did you abandon me?!” I asked her angrily.
“I had a job to do!” She stated, jumping up and drawing invisible patterns on the table with her fingers.
“But everybody else in this world was watching me embarrass myself last night! What could you have possibly had to do?”
She smiled at me and shook her head with each word, “Allison, Allison, Allison.” She stood made a swirling motion with her hands and from nothing, a dark black cloak appeared in her hands. It was so strange to see that color after so much unnatural white.
“You!” I gasped, fingering the material and realizing that it was exactly like the ones those annoying council members wore. “You’re going to teach me?!”
“Yep! Well, just the first part. I’m going to teach you how to make your weapons! Then somebody else will take over!”
I stared at her. “So you wrote that note? That was so...well...ummm...never mind...” I trailed off lamely.
“Yeah I know!” she grinned, “Anyway. Are you ready to go?”
“I guess s--”
“Ok let’s go!” she interrupted again. I smiled to myself and got up and put my empty dish into the sink.
Buzz made her cloak disappear and strode out of the door confidently. I was in the process of following her when I thought of a few things about this place that didn’t quite fit.
“Uh, Buzz?” I asked stopping right outside the door. “I may not be a religious expert but um, isn’t there supposed to be some sort of god? And if we’re dead, why don’t we have wings and halos?”
“Oh that,” she muttered “Well the council acts as sort of a god as you put it. We don’t really have that much of an effect on the people down on earth though. They made up the Bible, Buddha and all of the other religious stuff you have down there. They were pretty much right about the wings and the halos though! But you don’t get the wings until level 7. As for the halos, well, nobody gets those until they are council members. I have them but I choose not to show them. I have to keep a low profile around the towns-people. I can’t have them knowing I am on the council. It’s not allowed. I would have people coming to me night and day for help.”
“Oh ok.” I had no idea what she had just said. “So...where are we going?” I asked her as we walked through all of the white houses. People passed by too, staring at me. One little girl detached herself from her mother’s hand and skipped over to me to hand me a little white flower.
“Thank you” I said, taking it form her. “What’s this for?”
“Because you are going to save us.” she said simply and then skipped off back to her mother who grinned and led her daughter away, smoothing down her brown curls. I stared after her and suddenly realized that Buzz hadn’t stopped to wait for me and was now several houses ahead of me. I caught up with her and was about to pose my question again when she continued our conversation as if there had been no interruption.
“To my place!”
“How far away is it from here?” I asked fingering the girl’s flower in confusion.
“Not far.”
I fell silent watching Buzz’s apple green hair bounce up and down and she skipped in front of me. I realized she seemed a bit young to be teaching me war arts.
“Hey Buzz, how old are you?”
She stopped and turned back towards me, walking backwards. “13 when I died. 1064 years last month in all!”
“Wow!”
“Yeah it’s pretty interesting being this old.” She said, not sounding like she was enjoying it very much.
“What’s so bad about it?” I asked walking to her side.
“Nothing! We’re here!” She said quickly.
I looked away from Buzz to see a huge four story white house. Buzz opened the white gate and lead me into her giant house.
“How many people live here?” I asked in awe looking at the many rooms.
“Just me!” She sang. “Come on! Let’s get to work! You have a lot to learn and we don’t have all that much time.”
“Ok,” I said following her past several rooms. “You have a very nice house.” I complemented.
“Thanks. It was my brother’s. He left it for me when he....left.”
“Wow.” I said staring around at the large array of furniture.
Buzz had a brother?
“That’s cool.”
“Yep!” said Buzz. “Come on let’s go to the back room. We will start with a fighting staff.”
“Oh.” I said, slightly surprised. I had been thinking we would have been making a sword or a gun or something. What would I use a fighting staff for in a war?
We walked down several carpeted, twisting hallways with several closed doors. It was a large white wooden door with a white doorknob with carvings on it. The carvings were too small for me to see from where I was standing but they looked very intricate and beautiful.
“Let’s go!” She said, pulling open the door. I stepped over the thresh-hold and into a forest. Nope not kidding. A real forest. Huge redwood trees grew close together, the floor underneath them covered in ferns. Tiny wild flowers piked their heads out from under the leaves, shyly. Sunlight streamed through gaps in the branches, bathing the ground in a dappled, golden light. Several birds called to one another from the branches.
I was almost not surprised.
“Where did this come from?” I asked in awe.
“This was always here! We just built the house around it! It is a nice place to come and read or have a picnic or to get sticks and stuff to build fires and in our case, a fighting staff. So go ahead. Pick your wood.”
“Wait what am I supposed to do?” I asked, confused.
“Pick a good piece of wood to make a fighting staff out of!” Buzz said slowly as if it was the easiest thing in the world to do.
“You know I don’t have any experience with this at all right?”
“Well obviously or I wouldn’t have to teach you.”
“Ok.” I turned away from her and looked at all of the loose wood that was lying all over the ground. I would probably want a long one. Uh a long straight thick one. I rummaged through the sticks, rejecting the ones that were too, short, thin, or curved. I finally came across medium sized, relatively straight, and reasonably thick stick. It was the best one I had come across so far.
“How’s this?” I said holding out the stick to her.
She took it in her hands, and inspected every inch of it. After a few moments she took the branch in both hands and tried to break it across her knee. When it held she smiled approvingly and handed the stick back to me. “This will do.” she said walking away from me and my stick. I followed her twirling the stick experimentally in my hands. We walked across the thick carpeting of pine needles and ferns, dodging trees and listening to several birds singing their hearts out.
‘They must have been birds who died,’ I thought as I picked my way around a muddy puddle in the ground. Finally we broke through the trees and came to a grass filled clearing with several large, moss covered rocks scattered about. Buzz went over to a tree at the edge of the woods and pulled a leather-handled knife out of its rough bark.
She sat down on one of the rocks and beckoned for me to come over to her. I sat down on another rock and laid the stick across my lap. She handed me the knife handle first.
“Now you have to whittle it.” When I looked at her in confusion, she elaborated, “You have to take all of the bark off. You use the knife,” she demonstrated, taking knife and stick away from me, and slid the knife underneath a strip of bark and peeling it away from the wood.
She handed the objects back to me.
“Right. Okay got it.” I said holding the knife awkwardly in my left hand. I started stripping slivers of bark away from my stick. It was harder than it looked. The knife kept slipping. I tried switching the knife to my right hand but that was even worse. I gripped the knife tighter in my now sweaty left hand and continued. A couple of times I slipped and nicked my fingers, painfully. Buzz happily corrected me, moving the hands that were holding the stick in place behind the hand with the knife. It was hard. And I wasn’t very good at it.
It felt like I had been working for an hour.
“Ok, done.” I said tiredly holding out the now bark-less stick for inspection. “Good. For a first attempt of course.”
“Thanks.” I said bitterly, flexing my sore hands. At least I didn’t have to go through that process again.
“You will learn to use this later on in your training.” Buzz said placing the whittled stick on the ground next to her rock. I sighed in relief. I wouldn’t have to learn how to kill people for a while yet.
“ For now we will move on. Next we will make a spear!”
“Wait, a spear? You mean like wooden spear?”
“Yep! After you master the wooden stuff we will move onto metals!”
“So I have to whittle something again?”
“Yeah!”
I groaned inwardly lying back on the sun-warmed rock. No more whittling please.

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