Looks, Countenances and Effects

The moment he had come of an age where he wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows, the Program had him sent straight through a battery of training courses to qualify for the Unit. 

He’d run the gauntlet for a few years, alright: OSUT, Jump School, Ranger School, SFAS, SFQC, and a whole other salad of acronyms. 

One memory stuck with him early on through that blur of starch and polish, knees and elbows, and mud.

It was one of the endless formations, where he and his company of approximately a hundred other trainees were expected to stand ramrod straight. That day, a kid somehow more pink-cheeked than the rest of them was chosen to read off the The Soldier’s Creed.

There was nothing unusual about that, except that kid had already distinguished himself among their collection of screw-ups as a special kind. By then, he wasn’t sure that he could remember to wipe, much less recite a paragraph.

But so went the sergeants’ decree, which was inviolate. So there the kid stood sweating bullets, while the rest of the company was trying not to forget the older soldiers’ creed of "stay awake, stay alive" after being put through the wringer all through last night, courtesy of the very kid who stood before them. 

He cleared his throat, a regular Cicero about to deliver the Catilinarian orations. Then he screwed up at the first line.

“THE ARMY CREED!” he shouted, before remembering that he was supposed to be reciting the Soldier’s Creed. “Shit.”

That drew the first hushed giggles from the formation, put down quick by the first sergeant– more often referred to by “top”– a mean bastard from Kentucky.

He had a habit of drawing his combat knife and pointing the stabby end at the recruit he was talking to, or otherwise held it by the blade like he was going to throw it at the next guy to mess up his left from his right. 

If everyone else thought that he was taking the term “knife hand” too literally, nobody had the heart to tell him.

The kid continued his attempt under the top’s cover. He managed to stammer the first line out the second try, before faltering again on the next. But he trudged on, and he was almost home free, making it to a line that was supposed to say: "I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America, in close combat."

What he ended up saying was: “I WILL EMPLOY THE ENEMIES OF THE UNITED STATES.”

The chuckling was spilling over to chortling now, even as the first sergeant tried to keep the lid on tighter. But the climax of the kid’s performance was just coming up. For whatever reason, he thought it necessary to start over from that last mistake.

And so he recited the creed all over again, reaching the same point.
To correct his grave error, make up for everything,
With a flawless final reading–

“I WILL DESTROY THE UNITED STATES!”

With that the dam broke. Everybody keeled over, and the whole damn thing almost turned into a mass casualty event of soldiers dying from laughter. 

Even the first sergeant, who had until then never looked nothing less than carved from stone, dropped his military bearings and tripped all over them. Luckily, it was one of those times where his knife stayed sheathed.

Eventually, the non-coms got the wild bunch to some semblance of order, and eventually the kid got the whole thing right. His rousing speech was inaugurated by the sergeants making him the company guide, the pace-setter and lead man in the formation, for having the brass balls to destroy the USA.

Oh, the sergeants still struck the fear of Army God into him then.

If nothing else, they taught him his sense of humor.

 

Theo wasn’t sure why he recalled that particular incident as he sat in another, altogether much more lax formation halfway across the world, wearing a wholly different kind of uniform that left his feet feeling much more aired-out with the white indoor shoes. 

The entirety of the student body and school staff was gathered under the gymnasium for the entrance ceremony. Some geezer was pontificating on the value of education or some topic or the other on stage. 

He couldn’t speak for the staff, but he had the impression that most of the students around him were waiting for the spiel to end, more interested in chatting with their neighbors or staring off at the rafters. Most of his neighbors belonged to the latter group. Guess they were a bit intimidated.

It was a vaguely familiar scene; you could tell that nobody wanted to be there so early, though by his standards it was already late in the morning. The biggest difference was that nobody was looking to smoke him for some imagined infraction.
In fact, nobody was really looking at him at all.

Aside from the occasional askance look from the girl to his right, the people around him were thoroughly absorbed in the own affairs.

Well, this was in keeping with the whole point of going undercover. But at the same time, he’d hoped that being conspicuous would help him avoid suspicion. 

After all, if he acted the exact opposite of what was expected, then that would certainly make the bad guys think that he couldn’t possibly be an undercover asset. Or maybe not. At the very least, the fastest way to gauge people’s intentions was to catch their attention.

The more he thought about the situation, the more it made sense.

His eyes were only visible from the front, and in these days a guy his height wasn’t too off the baseline even here. He couldn’t expect his looks alone to do the heavy lifting. He’d have to back it up with something more to produce the desired impact.

In the middle of mulling it over, he found that the entrance ceremony was over. They were dismissed to find out their class assignments, stuck on to an oversize rolling blackboard which quickly attracted a crowd jostling for a look.

Theo didn’t have to bother with the jostling when he could see over the tops of their heads, and he easily spotted his assignment– he was on the standard academic track, like most of his class.
At the top of the board were written instructions on what to do next, depending on the year level.

He went off immediately to accomplish his. Never mind the specifics of his little plan for now; he had a tasking and a destination.

 

In the administrative chores that followed the assembly, waiting in line to sign off on his books, shoe locker numbers, there was nothing that he wasn’t already used to. 

The dull stuff of life was the same wherever you were, and Theo found comfort in that. Since he double-timed the whole affair, it turned out to be a fleeting reprieve; once he’d made his way to the classrooms, it was back to strange country for the American. 

He soon spotted a sign above the doorway in bold Latin lettering: 2-C. His class. Theo let himself inside. Hardly to this surprise, he was the first person there.

There was a seating plan on the blackboard. Sliding in between the rows of chairs, Theo soon found his. He dropped down to get a feel for his personal fiefdom for the next month. His seat was at the very back, by the door.

He sank back, feet crossed, and watched as his classmates filtered in throughout the next half-hour. First a guy, and then a girl, then all the rest came on. The classroom was about halfway full when he recognized one of them as she came in. 

It was the girl from earlier– the one who had almost slammed into him! 

He didn't have a name to match with the face, so he decided on the spot that he was calling her Rolling Girl for her stunt, at least for now. 

If Rolling Girl would’ve recognized him, Theo didn’t find out. She went straight for a friend and fired away with the chit-chat without batting an eye his way.

Momentarily, Theo felt a wisp of something off. Just as quickly it was gone, and the thought faded from his mind as another student strolled on through the sliding door. It wasn't long after Rolling Girl's arrival that the headcount matched up with the number of seats.

His classmates were all forming up to their own in-groups from last year. As the newest of the new, Theo was left alone to size up his new peers. He noted mannerisms, demeanor and apparent background, even as he pretended to be taking it easy at the back.

Naturally, the blue-eyed bystander attracted looks of his own. Tucked in the corner as he was, it seemed that nobody could muster the daring to make an approach just yet. Just as it seemed somebody was going to, the last person the class was waiting on made his entrance. 

The chipper atmosphere wilted away as a brooding adult settled in behind the teacher’s table. The man spared precious few words in introduction. He was their homeroom teacher, and he swept old eyes on each student with an unnerving intensity. 

Tall, gaunt, with a long, lantern jaw and blemished skin; for a man in his thirties, Tanabe-sensei looked like he belonged to a different era. He was dressed in a dull suit and slacks, which he somehow lent an air like he'd dug them up from some grave from the early twentieth century.

What escaped from his mouth as he started calling out attendance could only be called a voice generously: a high-pitched whine through which the melodic tones of Japanese were squeezed through, like raw meat through a rusty grinder.

Even Theo shifted in his seat slightly on hearing it. This Tanabe was shaping up to be a weird character, like something out of fiction. It struck as Theo as too obvious, but it might be worth looking into his recent activities. 

His ears continued to pick up on the teacher's words, but Theo retreated into his thoughts. Now that everyone was here, he began to build an internal roster of the room’s occupants, preliminary to his determinations on who was worth building up actual profiles on. 

Theo was deep in his mission headspace when events conspired to reel him back to reality. His turn had come up, but for what? 

Right, introductions. He knew about this part and hadn’t spared much thought for it, but here was his first real opportunity to advance his "be conspicuous" plan.  

Theo rose from his chair with a flourish.

“The name’s Theo Lovell, but you can call me Theo.”

He squared up to size, lending his classmates a full appreciation of his stature, and noted their gazes with satisfaction. He had their undivided attention.

Now for the important part– the impression he gave his audience, and not much the mundane contents of an introduction.

And mundane it was, really: his fictional parents, the not-entirely-fictional broad strokes of growing up in the USA, his return to this country of one-half his supposed origin. But to go with the casual power of his voice, he gestured naturally, filling the room with his presence.

“I’m still new to a lot of this stuff, so I’ll be grateful if you guys could give me some slack here and there.”

“Let’s have a good ‘un, everybody!”

He ended on a picture perfect smile, inviting his audience to join along.

Rather than join along, they looked at him perplexed and bewildered.

Perfect. He’d pulled that off perfectly.

So why were they looking at him like that?

Ah.

He’d been so preoccupied with his profile-building that he had defaulted to his language of thought. 

He'd been speaking English this entire time.

Theo blanked out for what seemed like an instant stretched into infinity, before his reflexes fired off and cut through the white noise.

Presence of mind, dammit!

Okay. Presence of mind was back, but now what? Theo fell back on his experience.
First – worst thing you could do is draw attention to the mistake.
Second – keep pushing, end it on the emotion you want them to feel.
Third – the speech must match the audience, and that’s where he failed.
His little speech was perfect alright, but he was preaching to the wrong damn choir!

Acting like he hadn’t just courted the entire room in a foreign language and expected acclaim, Theo quickly switched over to Japanese, playing the thing off as planned. The second time he made his introduction garnered him a favorable reception, and he dropped back down his seat to applause.

As unabashed as he looked when he sat back on his chair, Theo's insides churned with embarrassment.

Leave it up to the grunt to screw up an introduction!

He quickly mastered himself. With any luck, they’d think that the new guy was just a tad bit overeager to show off.

If nothing else, Theo felt just a bit closer to that kid from his training days, now.