Chapter Text
It was a lazy day inside the Humanities Faculty of the University of Revelstoke. Activity in the faculty’s hallway was minimal. It was a Friday and last day had been a regional holiday, so many of the students took the liberty to abstain from attending the lessons and make a homemade long weekend, filled with useful time to rest, or in most cases, advance some of the work in the form of various assignments that usually piled on the students’ shoulders.
That option wasn’t available for teachers (except for the dean it seemed) and this meant that Sandra was stuck with her lectures. She could also have used some time for herself, but she was prone to fall ill, and there was a limited number of times you could call in sick in a month without being suspicious.
She didn’t even have that much work to do, so she soon found herself staring at the screen of her laptop, incapable of thinking of anything to entertain herself. Yep, it was going to be a loooong day.
And for some reason, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was forgetting something important…
Feeding her cat in the morning? Done. Washing the last day’s dishes? Also done. Organizing her wardrobe? Undone, but she had been procrastinating that one specific chore for so long that to do it would feel wrong at this point.
Did she take her pills? Oh, great, now she was hesitating.
Being an axolotl-like Monster wasn’t easy once you didn’t have a water source around five steps from your house. Sandra couldn’t say she didn’t miss Waterfall a bit each time she had to take one of her skin-moisturizer pills for the day. During Revelstoke’s hot (for Canadian standards) summers she spent around half the time in one of the city’s pools. And with “in” I mean inside the water. Let’s just say sunbathing wasn’t for her.
Hey, if she didn’t remember, it couldn’t possibly be important, right?
Clover sat in the middle of the hallway with their back on the wall, well, on their backpack carefully placed between their back and the wall, because having back pains at their age would be a serious blow to their morale. They scrolled through pages and pages of a laughably bad historic article on their laptop. One advantage of studying for a history degree was that now they could read click-bait trash like that article and dissect how many inaccuracies and biases it had, thus getting filled with a strange notion of pride in their career path.
They were eating a ham sandwich while at it. They had made it themself. Once another thing that filled them with pride; somehow managing their life alone and not dying in the process. Some days ago that ham sandwich would be something bought from any of the many vending machines the university counted with, but no, they actually took their time to grab the ham from the fridge and!… Alrighty, now that I'm writing that aloud, it sounds pretty pathetic…
The thing is, ham sandwich in their hand, waiting for Chara’s lecture to end was, if not any less boring, at least more tasty.
“What are you reading?”
“Holy cow!— Chara?”
There went the ham sandwich, claimed by the cold, bleak floor. Clover rushed to rescue it… Was it three minutes or three seconds? You know, the time a foodstuff can spend on the floor before being invaded by bacteria? Whatever, they already took another bite out of it…
“No, I’m just their evil twin from an alternate timeline, Arach.”
“Well, I know you are lying because an anti-Chara wouldn’t be so sarcastic and also wouldn’t sneak up on me like that.”
Chara raised their arms. “You got me. I’m the real Chara. Would you prefer it to be otherwise?“
“…”
“Clover, no.”
“I mean… My arms would thank it… They wouldn’t be so sore”
“Who says evil Chara wouldn’t punch you too? You’re really punchable.”
“Is that a compliment or—
“Compliment.”
“Thank you then?”
Chara seemed satisfied. “You’re welcome.”
Clover got up from the floor and stowed the laptop in their backpack. “Where to now, pardner?”
“Library as always, C’mon.”
They spent the rest of their route to the faculty’s small library discussing where would an evil Chara go after the lectures with an evil Clover, and tried to figure out what could be considered the direct contrary to a library. The two friends had no rush; they enjoyed the silence that wasn’t usually native to the hallways.
“You know? I’m surprised to see you so relaxed. I thought you had a pretty big exam closing in.”
“Well, this one I had time to study, actually, so I now feel really confident.” Explained Clover.
“You did? Hey, nice multitasking there. I’m impressed.”
“Haha, thank you!… Wait, huh, what multitasking?”
Chara looked at the wall’s clock. “You know. Doing multiple tasks at the same time.
“I know the definition, Chara, what are you talking about?”
“The two tasks. You know. The exam and that one essay on pre-columbian civilizations you told me about last week.”
“The WHAT?”
“The… essay?”
“Ooooh Fuck. Hell no. No, no, no, no no!….” Clover shook their head. It seemed they weren’t the only one that had forgotten something.
“Let me guess, you forgot about it…”
They were now frantically searching for their phone somewhere inside the infinite void of their pockets. “I UTTERLY forgot about it.”
“Well, bad luck. You’ll have to put extra effort on that subject’s exams.“ Chara was the kind of person that had a twisted positivity and thought that at least all bad things made you learn.
“YES!!!”
“Hey, now the scared one is me. What happened?”
Clover updated the university website but nothing changed: It was true, the teacher hadn’t closed the delivery time window for the essays and the system was still accepting them. They lost no time explaining this to Chara.
“But I thought that was automatic. Why isn’t it closed already?”
“Because it only closes if you set up a date and an hour for it to end. Luckily, this one teacher hasn’t got a good memory and is always forgetting about setting it up, so she needs to do it manually each day.”
“Then you still have some time?”
“Ugh!… No I don’t.” Clover was experiencing sudden emotional changes by the moment. “She may be very forgetful but it has a limit. I have it measured. She usually realizes somewhere around these hours in the morning.”
“Well, as I said, bad luck. Now can we—“
“Doable.” Clover stared at their watch.”
“Did you say something?”
“Doable. It’s doable. I can make it.”
They scoffed. “No you can't. You said it yourself. Just accept defeat, Clover.”
“I won’t! I know I can do it!… With some help…”
“Absolutely not.”
“You didn’t even listen to my plan!”
Chara said nothing and just crossed their arms.
“You call that friendship?”
“…”
Clover got out their phone and pretended to dial some numbers. “Is this the friendship police? Yes, we got a bad friend here, officer…”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Clover, grow up! You screwed up, you accept the consequences, that’s all!”
“Ever heard the term give and take? You owe me a favor since I helped you train for that one boxing fight.”
“You didn’t help me train! You kept me company, which I appreciate, but it’s still different.”
“But I was there, wasn’t I?”
“…”
Chara made a grumpy face.
“C’mon…? And we’ll be even…?”
“I’m not dumb, I want to hear the plan first.”
“The plan is I run to the library and create a new category of speedrun and you go find my Pre-Columbian America teacher, named Sandra, and distract her for as many hours as I need.”
“But I don’t have any class with her, I don’t know her, how am I supposed to distract her?”
“You’ll make up something, I know it. Use your magical sociology powers to socialize with her!
“…”
“This is the part when you laugh.”
“Go write that stupid essay, and you better be quick.”
“I’m all over it!” And they ran down the hallway.
Chara sighed. “Why the hell did I do that…?”
Sandra completed her fifth match of Solitaire in a row. And at the same time finished her sixth bottle of water for the day. Hydration was important.
Solitaire wasn’t the only thing she had been doing though. She had also been looking into travel agencies. She always did this out of curiosity and interest, more than any real desire to travel the world. Who needed Malibu anyway? With its pristine beaches, and the pristine water in the pristine beaches, with all that ambient humidity…
Travels weren’t for her. They weren’t since a group of friends and her, wanting to see more of the Underground, had tried to visit Hotland. Bad idea. No more travels since then. Looking was sufficiently fine.
A knock on her door triggered a hidden knee-jerk reaction, prompting her to close the solitaire’s window and adopt a focused pose on her chair, because having the legs on the table apparently wasn’t deemed too professional by some.
“Come in!”
Now, normally, she would expect the visit of one of her estimated colleagues, or in rare occasions, of a student invested enough in her work to come and ask questions about it. The individual in front of her was in the age correspondent to the second group, but if Sandra could take pride in something it was having a good memory for faces and she was sure that person hadn’t put a foot on one of her lectures ever. Nevertheless, everyone committed errors from time to time, so she racked her brain in an attempt to find any sign of a memory with the stranger at all.
On Chara’s end things weren’t much better. Reading Sandra’s non-verbal language told them she was a pretty serious and firm woman, keeping a perfect posture on her chair and now for some reason staring at them with her eyes clenched. They couldn’t guess if she was trying to recognize them from something else or if she was just being plainly rude.
At that moment Chara realized they should probably say something. “… Is this Professor Lee's office?”
Sandra pointed at the nameplate that featured her name with a golden font. She kept a poker face but was probably thinking about how cool and mysterious she had looked doing that.
“Oh… Sorry. I just had some doubts I wanted to check about an essay…”
“What’s the essay about?” Sandra liked curious students. The ones that took the time to talk with teachers.
Bingo. She had taken the bait, and with extra fries.
“Oh, I’m a sociology student. I’m doing it on behavioral patterns and societal traits of various pre-contact cultures in South and Meso America.” Chara smiled. This was almost too easy.
Sandra’s face lit up instantly “Really??? Well those cultures happen to be my specialty! I’ll be more than glad to help!”
“That’s great!” Chara took a seat and took out a small notebook and a pencil. “Mind if I steal you time? I’m sure you must be pretty busy.”
“Nah… I’m good. Don’t worry about that, I think I can make room in my schedule… Did you want to learn about something in particular?”
Oh damn. Chara didn’t get this far in the conversation in their imagination. They thought that just saying “the Mayas” or “the Aztecs” would be too cliché. Fortunately, Flowey was a proficient consumer of historic documentaries, and by extension, some of that information had passed down to them through hours of bonding time together, which consisted of Chara being bored with their mobile phone on the couch and Flowey watching the TV, in this case, you might have guessed, historic documentaries. They could spend hours like that without saying a word except to fight over the control of the couch’s only blanket when it was cold.
“What can you tell me about the… Olmecs?” They said without much confidence.
“Interesting choice! Very little is known about the societal or political structure of Olmec society—“
“Nevermind, let's stick to the Mayans for now…”
“Aaaalright? Yeah, I can do that.”
The axolotl started to talk enthusiastically about Maya customs and hierarchical divisions, progressively relaxing her once stiff posture and interrupting her own speech with interesting yet out of place weird facts about Maya culture. She sported a fully blown smile during the whole process and gesticulated perhaps too much.
Meanwhile, Chara listened attentively and wrote some notes from time to time to keep up the appearances. They didn’t know how much time exactly it would take Clover to finish their essay, but they needed as much as they could, so the plan was to keep her talking with strategically placed questions for as long as it was possible without raising any alarms.
As interesting as it was, Chara’s patience had a limit. For them, human history was always the same. So they ended up begging for Clover to rush in no time. How hard could it be to write that essay anyway?
“I’m screwed…”
“Shhhh!”
Some things in life rarely change. One of those things was the head librarian of Revelstoke University’s library.
Henry Alderdice was there the day Newfoundland was integrated into Canada (by a slight margin), and there was never a day he wouldn’t remind everyone around him. It didn’t matter that he was a newborn baby, because the sole fact that he could credibly say that he was born in the Dominion of Newfoundland and not in Canada was enough pride for him. He refused to hear the national anthem and only accepted the Pink, White and Green as his flag.
To his secessionist antics his colleagues responded with indifference. The old man had to retire at some time, and when not fervently extolling the virtues of his island, he was generally a sweet and kind person, though severe on his job. Nobody knew why he lived all the way across the country if he liked so much Newfoundland, and nobody dared to ask. His presence was just taken for granted by both the teachers and the students.
But right now Clover wanted his presence to be a bit less… presential.
Due to the homemade-long-weekend we talked about in the beginning, the only ones between the gigantic bookshelves were Clover and Alderdice. The first one typed so fast and loudly in their laptop that the second one dedicated himself to glaring at him from across the room with those small and permanently squinting eyes of his.
So long Clover had been filling the Word document with the biggest amount of facts about Mesoamerican civilizations he could gather. But he needed references. And searching for references was time-consuming. And his time was scarce. And it was hard to concentrate when you were being judged by a grumpy librarian who looked like the human version of Yoda.
He wrote something down and then erased it immediately. He had been stuck for… Two minutes now. Way too much time already.
Oh dear, this would be fun.
“So when we talk about Maya social mobility we must understand it was always within the borders of the commoner-elite dichotomy, and we haven’t really understood yet how much political influence you could accumulate if, for example, you proved to be an exceptional warrior…”
At this point it had been approximately fifteen minutes since Chara had stopped taking notes out of pure tiredness. They, just as Sandra, had lost any kind of manners they could probably have sought to follow and were resting their feet on the table and biting their pencil while looking at the ceiling. When they realized what kind of posture they were in, they instantly repositioned, feeling slightly ashamed.
“Oh, shit— I mean, sorry for that.”
Sandra took her time to understand what the problem was.
“Aaah! The feet on the table? Don’t worry about that, if I’m being honest with you, I always do the same. Well! As I were saying—“
Chara interrupted her. They couldn’t care less about Clover’s essay, they just had a thought they couldn’t get out of their head.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course!”
“Why human history?”
“Huh? What?”
Chara left out a deep breath. “Years and years and years of being oppressed under their boots and the first thing you do when you get to the Surface is studying their history? I… I can’t understand that.”
“…”
“The… Passion you talk with… All for a history that doesn’t belong to you, happening in a land stolen from you…”
“I… Heheh… You got me by surprise there… I don’t know what to answer, really. I have never seen it that way… I guess I just liked the topic.”
“… Forget about it. Sorry for bringing this up.”
Sandra’s phone buzzed. It was a friendly reminder that she should have closed the essay’s time window some time ago.
“No! It’s an interesting question!…. Just…” She looked at her phone and cringed. “Wait a minute ok? I got something I need to do.”
Chara panicked. They knew exactly what was that “something”
“I, huh, I have more questions about the Maya.”
“And that’s great, and I’ll be happy to help you the moment I finish this…” She tapped the screen, logging in to the university web. “Just a moment…”
“You… You… There is a spider crawling on your phone! You have one right there!
“Do I? Sandra checked without interest. “No, I don’t, no need to worry…”
“(Well at least I tried.)”
Clover was sooo close to the end. Their mind raced with all the possible words… Just enough to fill the bare word minimum established in the guidelines…
Two hours and a half of non-stop historic action, a race against the clock where they had to invest even the smallest strength they had left to put together a mediocre (at best) university essay.
They finished and saved it, rushing to the tab with the university’s webpage, clicking that hand in button and!…
Successfully handed in.
“YEEES!!! WHOOOHOO!!!”
“SHHHH!!!”
“Finally…”
Clover had been waiting for Chara. Least thing they could do after the favor.
“Please tell me you could hand it in in time.”
“Yep! Everything’s fine! I hit that button seconds before the time was cut.”
“Then are we even now?”
“What do you me— Oh yes. We’re even. For the training thing. Yeah, we’re even now.”
“So how was the experience of writing an essay in two hours?”
“Horrible. I think I need a nap. Also now the librarian hates me…?”
“Nah, he’s just a bit grumpy. He’ll come around.”
“What about you? How was your talk with Professor Sandra?”
“Not that bad actually. We ended up talking about some interesting topics…”
“Like…?”
“The stupidity of humanity.”
“Yeah, conversations with you frequently end up on that topic… —Auch!”
“Deserved.”
“That one’s going to leave a bruise…”