Chapter 75

[The following chapter contains strong language. Reader caution is advised.]

Saturday 29th April 2000

Alright, before I get onto the latest stuff, I should address the big naked yellow-and-orange elephant in the room…

Still uneasy and suspicious, I interrogated both Bao and Lucy – separately (and dressed, thankfully) – the following morning. I don’t want to sound like an over-protective big brother… rather, I know what she’s like, and with the circumstances and hormones and everything else taken into account…

“No, man, we didn’t bump uglies!” Bao assured me uneasily. “I get it, it wouldn’t have been right, maybe if we were dating or something it’d be okay and it’s not like I’d never consider dating her but then I’m not interested right now and…”
He stopped to take some much-deserved breaths.

“Dude, it’s okay, I just… wanted to make sure,” I told him, feeling like the guilty party now. “It would’ve felt weird if you two screwed…”

“No, totally, I got you,” he nodded vigorously. “I mean, full disclosure, she did toss me off…”

Have you ever heard something that immediately birthed a mental image, even though it was the last thing you wanted in your head? It’s happened to me plenty of times, and I had the displeasure of experiencing it once again right then.

“Seriously?!” I winced as though it would purge my mind of unwanted thoughts.

“We were both naked and it was easy for her to grab and… cut me some slack, I’ve been single for five months!” he whimpered.

“Okay, okay, I can live with it, it’s weird for me but it could’ve been worse…” I reasoned with a sigh. “Last thing, Dakota’s question, and I guess especially important with that revelation… did either of you wipe the sofa down earlier…?”

“Yes. Definitely. I’m pretty sure.”

“I’m getting mixed messages here, Bao…”

“I was thinking about Elvis Presley songs while I was doing it,” he muttered, almost more to himself than to me, “so yeah, I’m sure I did it.”

That was good enough for me. I had the truth: now time to see what my sister had to say about it, and how far she decided to twist the facts. It was Lucy, after all… she’s a master of exaggeration, in all fields except for believability. Makes you wonder why I’d even bother asking her, and really, I only did it so that things were out in the open and not something hanging between us and never addressed.

“Oh, yeah, stuff happened!” she beamed. Non-specific, but affirmative. Fair play.

“Can stuff not happen in future?” I grumbled at her. “I mean, you still have to sort stuff out with Kendal and Nathan, don’t start doing things with Bao…”

“But I’m working my way through the Painters!”
Like she meant it. Like it wasn’t a ridiculous idea.
“Don’t worry, bro… I’m saving you for last!”

If you’d like to imagine me hitting her upside the head like something out of an old double-act, feel free. I didn’t do that (not one for violence, monster fights aside), I just threw my hands up in defeat and walked off, but you’re free to picture something funnier. Come up with a witty remark for me! It’s like a create-your-own-adventure book!

Anyway. The remaining few days of the Easter holiday flew by like a whirlwind, and we found ourselves back at school before we knew it. With that, of course, our time all living together came to an end too, and Kendal in particular made a big fuss about us doing it again during the summer. To be honest, I think it would be nice. For how surreal it had felt at first, the (comparatively) quieter normality now didn’t quite seem right. Not that I was there at night to see it myself… back home for nights before school, as ever.

Just Dakota, Zahid and Kitty living there. And Bao and Kendal had tried to press him into patching things up with his family, but he wasn’t having any of it.

As usual, we rested on our laurels long enough for trouble to come looking for us instead.

It was a fair Saturday afternoon when a firm knock at the front door dented our airy conversation.

“I’ll go!” Kendal chirped, sprinting off like the knock was a starting pistol and disappearing out of sight within three seconds.

“I’ll never know where she gets the energy from…” I murmured with a stretch.

“Anyway,” Bao continued almost unphased, “the guy was all ‘no way, rabbits definitely can’t do that’, so I-”

“Zahiiid, your sister’s here!” Kendal’s voice abruptly rang out from the hallway.

“But the rabbits…!” Bao whined, accompanied by the sound of Zahid groaning loudly.

“The rabbits, god damn it!” Lucy cawed seemingly more for the sake of it than anything.

“I never thought I’d want to hear about fucking rabbits more than anything else…”

Zahid rose from where he was sat, carrying some kind of unseen weight like a samurai preparing to head into their final fight.

“They weren’t fucking,” Bao told him, matter-of-factness punctured by his tongue clearly being pressed to his cheek. Unfortunately, Zahid didn’t so much as tut at the joke, entirely too distracted by his imminent confrontation with his older sister.

He strolled out to the front door.

“He does still exist!” I heard Samira Hassan declare a second later; Kendal tittered at that.

“Unless you’re bringing me an apology letter, I don’t wanna know,” Zahid growled at her pre-emptively.

“It’s been three months now. That’s more than enough time to sulk and come to your senses, and no, before you go off on another rant, I don’t mean realising you’re in the wrong, I mean recognising that we can work constructively on this…”
There was something I really liked about her voice. It wasn’t strictly soothing, but it was very easy to listen to. Still, I imagine any impact it might have on your average person wouldn’t work on the brother who’s known her for his entire life. It certainly didn’t here.

“Something must have changed since I left, then, because last time I saw those two, there was no way in hell they’d ever try and work constructively. They just want to dictate who I should be.”

“Alright, alright, easy there, people,” Kendal attempted to soothe them. “Samira, right? Wanna come in?”

“No, she doesn’t-”

“It looks like this is going to take a while,” Samira interrupted her brother, “so sure, that would be lovely, thank you.”

“Great! And I’m Kendal Carr!”

Zahid stomped back into the living room with the scowl to end all scowls on his face. He all but threw himself back into the chair, with enough force that it momentarily tilted backwards. A moment later, Kendal led Samira in; the young woman gave us all a nod and a warm smile.

“Hello, I’m Samira Hassan,” she greeted us, and then looked my way. “Dakota and Alex, right?”

“The very same!” Dakota smiled back.

“And I’m Alex’s cool sister, Lucy!”

“I’m Bao! Bao Thomson!”

“Kitty Townsend…”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you all,” Samira remarked while Zahid continued to sulk behind her. She turned to him, and sighed at the sight.
“Zahid…”

“Don’t worry, we’ll help you kick his arse if you have to!” Kendal jested, grabbing his shoulders from behind and shaking him lightly.

“You were on my side before…” he pointed out, glowering.

“We understand where you’re coming from,” Dakota told him softly, “but we all want you to make amends and-”

“Not still have the inside edge living here,” Kendal concluded, moving his shoulders back and forth in alternate left-and-right motions.

“Alright, why don’t you guys go and talk to my parents instead, then? If you’re so confident it’s that easy to make them understand, go and get it all fixed.”

“They’re willing to listen to you, Zahid.”
Samira perched herself on the arm of his chair.
“They’ve been thinking since you left, and I’ve had words with them too. They’ve finally got their heads around the fact you’re not just being rebellious for the sake of it. Because you’re not, are you? Maybe they won’t be able to understand, but it’s worth a try.”

Zahid closed his eyes tight in pained consideration. The rest of us waited with bated breath, every second of his deliberation holding the room hostage.

“No,” he finally decided. “It’s not happening.”

“You can’t avoid your family for the rest of your life…” Samira sighed.

“Just watch me.”

“Listen to yourself! You’re eighteen now, you really have to start acting like an adult!”
She tugged lightly at her collar, fanning herself. It was starting to feel hot…

“Right, sorry, Mum and Dad don’t treat me like an adult so it’s hard to remember.”

“Give them a chance and they’ll give you one too!”

“Zahid…” Dakota began, and his gaze locked onto her.

“Yeah, go on, side with her!” he snarled, turning back to his sister right after. “Whatever I do is wrong, isn’t it?! They keep looking down on me for who I am and it’s my fault! I try to get away from them and I’m the bad guy!”

“This isn’t about being good or bad, it’s about making amends and moving on!” Samira insisted, voice raised but still calm and firm.

“Guys,” Lucy whispered to the rest of us (I say whispered, but it was more slightly-less-than-average volume), “it’s getting really hot in here and I’m thinking it’s a Lokonessence thing…”

“Probably…” Kitty noted in dismay.

“And it’s too late to try and calm Zahid down,” I added, “so we don’t have much choice…”

Within the next few seconds, the temperature in the room accelerated a ridiculous amount, my entire field of vision abruptly filling with flames that then died away just as quickly.

“What was that…?” Samira asked, spooked, looking about the room with wide eyes. Everything was orange-hued now, as though a sunset was dying the sky outside.

“For fuck’s sake…” Zahid muttered sharply. He rose from his seat and marched back out to the hallway.

“Zahid, wait…!” his sister called, hurrying after him.

“Things don’t look too good outside…” Bao informed us, peering out of the window. As we huddled around, a hellish landscape ripe for a heavy metal album cover struck us. The general shape of the street remained, leaving us in some kind of volcanic valley, but there was little else left of the normal world.

Samira scampered back into the living room, her eyes somehow wider than before.
“I don’t understand what’s happening but this is literally unreal…”

“Ooh, ooh, can I tell her?” Lucy asked, bouncing on the spot excitedly.

“You have to promise to keep this secret, Samira,” Dakota instead focused on the young woman. “What’s happening and what we’re about to tell you.”

Perhaps it was the severity with which Dakota spoke, or perhaps she simply knew implicitly to trust her…
“I promise.”
Trying to steel her nerves, even if her chest was still moving fast.

Mulling over the words briefly, Dakota then looked Samira straight in the eye.
“We’re the Painters. Zahid included. And this is the kind of thing we have to deal with.”

Samira took a moment to process that revelation, eyes darting this way and that.

“I get to tell the next person…” Lucy pouted, teleporting her daggers into her hands.

“The Painters…?” Samira repeated shakily. “All of you?”

Dakota responded simply by summoning her spear, and the rest of us brought forth our weapons in turn.

Our guest nodded lightly at that.
“Okay then…”

The six of us blasted on our Painter gear in our familiar flashes of colour, and then hurried past Samira to make our way outside. The door was already open, heat wafting in like the entire world beyond was an oven. If not for our costumes (and Lokonessence itself) doing their best to regulate our body temperatures, it would have been insufferable.

“We find Zahid, we calm him down and fight whatever’s out here, and we get this over and done with,” Dakota reeled off as we stood in the hallway, and then she began the trek outside with the rest of us following after her.

As I stepped outside, the ground felt somewhat ashy beneath my feet. The sky was red and smoky, and down the end of the street, Zahid was swinging his axe towards scarlet imps.

“Huh, would’ve thought he’d imagine something scarier…” Kendal mused, before bringing forth her bow and firing arrows in their direction.

“Company!” Kitty yelled out from behind us, and I turned in time to see more of the demonic critters charging for us, moving like monkeys. Kitty and I slashed towards them and unleashed coloured arcs at the same time, managing to strike half of them down before they could get too close. Bao leapt in front of us, and threw his arms forward, managing to take out another three as they lunged for us.

“Staggered approach!” Dakota commanded. “Bao, Kitty, Lucy, handle the ones coming after us! Alex, Kendal, we’ll make our way to Zahid!”

Various affirmative responses were made as we fell into formation: Dakota, Kendal and I began dashing up the valley, locked onto Zahid as he swatted imps like flies with his axe, his fury visible with every motion. Kendal continued firing arrow after arrow at our destination, while I played a defensive tactic, dragging the tip of my sword along the ground as we ran and tracing a blue line that I could manipulate at a moment’s notice.

More imps emerged over the valley’s edges, silvery eyes locked onto the three of us as we ran.

Still drawing the line, I triggered it, a jagged blue wall rising up and pointing outwards. The red-skinned monsters pounced; I urged the wall higher and higher, curving the opposite way, forming over us as a tunnel. The sound of the imps landing down on the tunnel – thumps and screeches – followed.

“Fuck you!” I heard Zahid address his opponents only a handful of feet away now.

“Zahid!” Dakota called ahead to him.

“I know, before you say it!” he snapped at her. “Let me fight through it!”

“You don’t have to!” Kendal told him, firing at an imp as it leapt for his back, knocking it away before it could claw at him. “Face it like a normal person!”

“We’re not normal people, though! This is how we deal with our issues, isn’t it?!”
His axe sliced an imp clean in two, and its body smudged away in mid-air.
“That’s why this keeps happening, because we’re not allowed to handle things any other way!”

The three of us reached him, right as the creatures atop the tunnel made their way down and ran towards us. Dakota unleashed a barbed, snaking trail of green which slithered quickly between the imps, cutting some of them. Not content with that, she darted forwards and began striking at our enemies with her spear itself, moving elegantly as many of them turned their attention squarely on her.

“That isn’t true, Zahid!” I turned back to my frustrated friend.

“Yes it is!”
Narrowly missing the same imp twice, three times, finally striking it with an almighty swing and a primal roar.

“This is Harmony fucking around with our feelings! We can’t let her decide how to live-!”

“We already have! Look at us!” Zahid cried out, momentarily throwing his arms wide as if to demonstrate the warped world and its inhabitants. “This is what she thinks of me, Alex!”

“That doesn’t-!”
An imp caught my peripheral vision: I wasn’t fast enough to attack it, only enough to start turning and to have it land on my chest rather than my right arm. I released a burst of blue from my sword’s blade, frazzling the critter, and it fell to the ground.
“That doesn’t mean you have to let her win! She knows you’re afraid-!”

“I’m not afraid!” he roared at me.

“Yes, you are, you idiot!” I hissed back with almost as much ferocity. “Cos you got fucking complacent!”

“More imps on your tail, Alex!” Kendal alerted me. I turned in time to see her pink arrows hit two of them, and I swiftly sliced through the rest, turning myself back to face Zahid with the momentum I’d used.

“You’ve been away from them so long that you’re afraid to face them! That’s all this is!”

“You think I’m scared of them?” he asked in abject defiance.

“No, you’re scared of seeing them again! And look at what Harmony’s done with that fear! Look at how big of a deal it’s become!”
Another imp landed on my head, and I simply grabbed it and threw it to the ground, suddenly so worked up that I was angry enough to do that.
“I get that it’s not easy and I’d probably be even worse than you in your position, but be strong and fucking face up to it!”

“I’m not scared, you arsehole!” he screamed at me, face contorted in rage that seemed singularly focused on me now.

“Then prove it!”

“Yeah!” Kendal chimed in. “You’re Zahid! You’re a beast! Go and tell your parents-”

An ominous rumble cut her off, the ground beneath us quaking and cracking. Beyond Zahid, the earth itself split apart, red light and brimstone bursting out of the crevice as two larger imps – human-sized, if not larger – clambered free.

“Or them…” Kendal added to her previous statement uneasily.

“Heh.”
That was the first thing to come from Zahid’s mouth.
“Heheheh…”
I could practically hear the smirk.

He burst into laughter in the face of the two demons.

“What the hell are those?!” Bao asked from somewhere behind me, before finding the temerity to add, “pun intended.”

“Versions of his parents…” Kitty observed astutely – it only made sense, when we’d fought a twisted vision of her family a few months ago.

“Zahid’s a devil-child?” Lucy quizzed. “Cos that kind of makes sense.”

All the while, Zahid had finally conquered his laughter, and was sizing his two new opponents up.
“Alright, come on, chuckle-fucks. You’re not even half as scary as the real deal.”
He spun his axe in anticipation.

I only saw him charge towards them before more imps did the same to the rest of us. I swung low, taking a handful out, and Lucy sprang forwards, her daggers cutting through all but two of the rest in our immediate vicinity. The remaining two leapt onto her: I tapped my sword against her nearest dagger, inciting a surge of blue and orange that fried the two just like the one I’d dealt with before.

Zahid was somehow managing to battle both of the demonic figures at once, avoiding their lumbering blows and jumping high to deal axe-strikes to their bodies.

Lucy slashed the next batch of imps approaching us, and I span on my heel to cut down a group sneaking up on us.

One of the demons let out a pained howl: the female (demoness?) collapsed to her knees, and Zahid turned his attention to the male.

“Don’t worry,” he began as the blade of his axe charged up, “I’m not into patricide.”

The demon snarled back, and swept its clawed hand for him.

Zahid met the swipe with one of his own, the axe launching a magnified version of itself in pure red right at the beast’s chest.

The Lokon-powered blow struck first, and an explosion of red flooded the valley.

As my vision cleared, I could see the world return to normal… regular light, ordinary houses, a relatively-pristine road.

Zahid panted as he triumphantly began the walk back to Dakota’s, an earnest smile on his face.

“Awh, that’s it…?” Lucy grimaced as the rest of us began heading after Zahid.

“That’s it,” I told her with a pat on the back.

Samira was stood in the driveway. How much she’d seen, I don’t know, but she seemed pretty blown away.
“I can’t get my head around what I just saw…” I heard her claim once Zahid reached her.

“The short version is, I’m ready to talk with Mum and Dad,” he told her as he strolled past, back indoors.

…

That was honestly it, in the end. That fight – and, I suppose, the thoughts I’d been considering for a little while, and perhaps could have said sooner, under calmer circumstances – was all that he needed to return home with his sister and face his parents. He returned a couple of hours later to collect his stuff.

“They’re still annoying,” he deflected at first, “but they’re gonna give me a little space. And… we’re gonna talk some more about my faith and stuff.”

“That sounds good!” Dakota beamed at him.

“I told them, too,” he added. “About being a Painter. Samira said we should be open… not used to that, feels weird.”
Just a little smile on his face when he said that. I wouldn’t go as far to say he seemed like a weight had been lifted, but there was something that had changed about him, in a small way.

It was a Saturday, and so I was staying the night as I had the night before. Suddenly not having Zahid there, after three months, once again felt notably odd.

“This place feels so empty,” Dakota mentioned as we lay in bed.

“I was thinking that, yeah…” I nodded. “Kitty will be moving out next.”

“Don’t say that, I don’t know what I’d do if it was just me here most nights…”
She snuggled up to me, a hand on my bare chest.
“I’m happy for him, though,” she continued. “And y’know what else? I’m happy for us. We can make as much noise as we want tonight…”
Those eyes, all of a sudden. That look. Good god.

“But Kitty’s still… … this is why you gave her the portable CD player earlier, isn’t it…?”

She giggled as she straddled me.

It was a pretty good day, all-in-all.