Lisa the Legend: Chapter 82 - Last Night on Earth now up! (24th June 2013)

[Gavin Luper]

G'day readers,

Okay, it's been a long time, I know, so I have to say a huge thank you to all my readers for your unwavering patience and commitment to Lisa's unfolding story: it will be, I hope, rewarded in due course.

Firstly, I did address my extended absence in some detail in Smiley Town, but I feel like I owe my LTL readers - as distinct from all other fanficcers - a more specific apology, so, I have to say I'm sorry for leaving you all in the lurch for the last few months. Though I have checked TPM regularly, I have scarcely posted or contributed since May, and I'm sorry about that. My absence can be explained by a combination of my job, my relationship and new villa with my partner, and also - more specifically - by a convalescent period of giving up a problematic addiction to alcohol and going sober to basically grow up and deal with my issues. (Five months sober now, and counting!)

Now that we've got that out of the way, I'll get on with responding to your replies from May.

Sike: Indeed, Lisa's mental state was pretty paranoid at that point, so it's no wonder she was quite so trigger happy. I think the result was quite amusing, as well as realistic, I hope. I'm glad you enjoyed the HSM and yeah, I chuckled to myself when I wrote that line, it was ridiculously satisfying. As for Gavin's scene, it will come into play, but not for quite some time yet ... Thanks for reading so loyally as you always do, and I hope you enjoy the upcoming chapters ... I think there will be quite a few HSMs ahead, and not in the usual style, either. Cheers!

Tara: Yay, I'm stoked that the mood of the chapter had such a strong impact on you. I think it was much more frightening when Lisa is sneaking around the streets of Red Rock as opposed to actually being confronted with the Union. The threat is always more frightening than the actual agent posing the threat, it seems - at least in writing. And thanks for your feedback about the general shape of the chapters and the way they end. It's something that I think changes a lot over the next five or so chapters ... but I'd love your feedback on whether or not it actually does differ from the present structure or not. Thanks as always for reading, and I hope you'll have enough breathing space to read the next instalments!

Guys, chapter 69 has been written for ages, but there are a couple of sentences (seriously, that's all) that need to be rewritten before I post it. I'm going to work on it tonight (I'm currently absorbed with the current new chapter I'm writing) and so it will hopefully be up very shortly.

Thanks again everyone for sticking around.

Cheers!

- Gavin.

[Gavin Luper]

So as it turns out, I worked on the new chapter instead of this one last weekend! But I've fixed up the things that were bothering me about this chapter this afternoon, so - here it is! A short and sweet chapter, but a pivotal one, I think.

Bonus points to the reader who can guess the real-life TV show where the quotation on the poster comes from!

Cheers!

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

Chapter 69 – The Awakening.


A chink of sunlight found its way onto Lisa’s face, warming her cheek.

She stirred and opened her eyes. At once, her eyes fell upon a loud poster affixed to a brick wall barely two inches from her face. Dimly aware of a dull pain on the right side of her face, she wriggled back from the wall slightly to examine the poster. On a lurid yellow background, heavy black text proclaimed:

SO YOU’RE JUST GONNA ROLL OVER AND GIVE UP LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO? OR ARE YOU FINALLY GONNA GET MAD AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?

Lisa rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and reread the poster.

Abruptly, a voice very close to her ear said, “It’s from a TV show I like.”

Without meaning to, Lisa let out a shocked yelp. Swivelling around, her eyes fell onto a teenager with bleached-blond hair sprawled in the bed beside her, naked except for a pair of satin boxer shorts emblazoned with the logo of a beer brand.

“Ohhhh…”

She clutched her hands to her head and rolled back to face the wall, as though turning away would somehow make the young man disappear. Her momentary peace lasted all of three seconds.

“You feelin okay?” asked the boy. “You hit your head pretty bad when we landed.”

Lisa gritted her teeth against the throbbing in the right side of her face. “No, I’m fine,” she said brusquely. Memories of a bird screeching as the ground spiralled closer were spiralling in her mind. “What happened to the Pidgeot?”

“Dunno,” the boy said, too indifferently for Lisa’s liking. “Those people didn’t chase us, but I think they shot something at us. Maybe the bird copped a bullet in the wing.”

Her face still averted, Lisa scowled. She peeped out through her fingers at her body: she was still dressed in the red-and-yellow Surf Life Saver shirt and damp jeans (the sheets of the double bed were visibly dampened), with her old jumper thrown over her as a makeshift blanket. She shifted and glanced around the room, vaguely recalling stumbling into it the night before: there was a distinct lack of furniture – only the bed on which she lay and a bland wooden sideboard – and the carpet was a dull cream colour. The haphazard collection of various posters on the face-brick walls, however, made it clear that the room belonged to a teenage boy: the number of punk band posters was dwarfed only by the number of near-nude female pin-ups.

She rolled back to face the boy, who was now laying flat on his back, regarding one of the naked pin-ups with mild interest.

“We’re at your house, then?”

The boy sniffed and absent-mindedly scratched his hairless chest.

“No, I told you last night …” He looked at Lisa with a raised eyebrow. “How hard did you hit your head? Anyway … no, it’s my mum’s place. Well, actually, my ex-mum’s place.”

“Your what?”

“Long story. I don’t call her my mother anymore.”

Lisa felt her contempt toward the boy augment.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s reality,” snarled the boy, looking at Lisa with affront.

Lisa perched herself on her elbow and examined the boy’s stubborn expression. “What could she possibly have done to deserve that?”

“None of your business,” the boy shrugged, unabashedly scratching his crotch.

Lisa rolled onto her back and gazed blankly at the patterned white cornice. “So you’ve written her off completely, and yet you still live in the same house?”

“Who are you, Judge Judy? I don’t live here anymore. FYI, I only came here last night because the Pidgeot fell about a block from here.” He coughed and slid out of bed. “I’m getting food.”

Without a second look back at her, he left the room, slamming the door in his wake.

Lisa cast her eye over the unmade double bed, a gnawing anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She had only ever slept beside one other boy – Gavin – and they had never been so close as to share the same sheets. In any case, she was comfortable with Gavin; this boy, on the other hand, was a stranger – a repulsive one, at that – and he had not even been so chivalrous to sleep elsewhere but rather, had thrown Lisa into his own bed. She shuddered. She knew nothing could have happened, but she felt inexplicably guilty at having spent the night there, like she had broken some cardinal rule of purity. She glanced at the black, orange and white logo of the Ecruteak Fruitbats jumper her father had given her and felt slightly nauseous. The thought of what Dad would say about where she had spent the night was downright terrifying, yet at the same time, Lisa felt suddenly empowered, as though by inadvertently breaking her parents’ rules she had somehow, all at once, grown up.

She returned to gazing up at the cornice and trying to gather her frazzled thoughts. It was odd to find that she was not surprised by the Union’s ambush at the Colosseum: indeed, even at the time, she had practically been anticipating it. The Union’s doggedness was quickly becoming nothing more than a horrible fact of life.

Had the Guard members ever made it to the Colosseum? Would they have arrived at midnight, as planned, to find the trainer’s entrance destroyed by fire? Would they assume the worst?

Lisa’s heart leapt; her eyes scanned the room until they landed on a black-and-white analogue clock resting on the sideboard: it was only seven-thirty. Could the Guard members still be on Red Rock Island? Perhaps, if she could make contact again, they might still be able to extract her to the safety of the Guard’s care?

As her brain played over the possibility, she found her eyes drawn to the bold poster by the bed once more.

The door creaked as it swung back open. Still half-naked, the blond-haired boy walked in carrying a wooden tray with two bowls perched atop it.

“Corn flakes,” he said shortly, placing the tray on the sideboard. “All we’ve got.”

“Oh – thank you,” Lisa spluttered, genuinely thrown. She had not expected the boy to have any regard for her. Sitting up and crossing her legs, she took the bowl and began to satisfy her aching stomach.

The boy sat down beside her and began to munch at his own breakfast, though with far less vigour than she.

“Go easy,” he said, in the closest thing to an amused tone Lisa had heard from him yet.

Lisa swallowed down her fourth mouthful and wiped a drop of milk off her cheek.

“I haven’t eaten anything in a day,” she explained thickly.

The boy raised an eyebrow.

“Well, you’re not overweight, you know,” he said, apparently nonplussed. “You don’t need to starve yourself.”

Lisa laughed.

“It wasn’t voluntary.”

She shovelled another spoonful of soggy corn flakes into her mouth and ate gratefully. After a few minutes of silence, punctuated only by the sound of chewing and the clinking of the metal spoons on bowls, the boy spoke up.

“So … what the fuck happened last night?”

Lisa lifted the bowl up to her mouth to drain some of the milk away; she was several exhausting days past giving any consideration to decorum.

“Well, that ‘media paranoia’ you spoke of tried to kill us,” she said dryly, evoking the most deadpan voice she could manage. “Actually, they were only trying to capture me. But I’d bet everything I have that they’d’ve killed you on the spot.”

The boy’s black eyebrow rose again toward his bleached-blond hairline.

“You act tough, it’s cute,” he said, smirking.

Lisa felt a balloon of indignation pop within her chest.

“You’re hardly one to talk!” she shot back. “Who did I have to drag along behind me last night because he copped a piddly Ice Beam to the leg? ‘It’s burning, it’s burning’!” She laughed, partly out of mirth but mostly out of derision.

“That was serious!” the boy cried, jabbing a finger in the direction of his knee. There was a faint pink ring around it, residue of the ice burn.

“No,” Lisa said. “This is serious.”

She reached over to the neck of her shirt and pulled it down, exposing her bare shoulder blade and the ugly purple scar that still covered part of it.

“Duuuuude … what is that?”

“That’s where the Union shot me a month ago,” Lisa replied coolly, readjusting her shirt. “Don’t call me cute,” she added scathingly.

The boy’s eyes had widened: he looked both shocked and deeply impressed.

“So why did they attack us last night?”

Lisa scooped the dregs of her cereal into the spoon. “I’d need about a whole day to actually explain the whole thing to you, to be honest,” she said. “The short version is, they need me more than just about anything, and I keep getting away from them.”

The boy’s mouth was hanging slightly open.

“Come on, you can’t just leave it at that …”

Lisa beamed at him. “Can I use your phone?”

A devious expression stole over the boy’s pale face.

“No. Not until you tell me about the Union,” he grinned exultantly.

Lisa sighed.

“Come on, you had that coming!” the boy cried. “Besides … this is hardcore, dude! Come on, I wanna know how you got mixed up in this!”

“If I tell you, do you promise to let me use your phone straight away?”

“Totally. I promise.”

Lisa scratched her head, silently making up her mind.

“Right,” she said eventually, “Pay attention, then.”

The little hand on the clock had moved around to the number eight by the time Lisa had finished running the boy through her (much abbreviated) story. His eyes seemed to have bulged further and further out of his head with each twist and turn; at times, there was a wry smirk on his face that suggested he did not believe a word she was telling him, and at other times, his mouth was slack with genuine astonishment.

“And so that’s where our paths crossed,” Lisa finished. “I was meant to be meeting some Guard members at the trainer’s entrance. When I saw you there, I assumed you were a Union agent, that’s why I attacked you. Sorry about that.”

The boy blinked dismissively.

“Well, that’s … a lot to take in,” he managed at length. “It’d be a lot easier to believe if I was wasted …”

Lisa rolled her eyes, and made no attempt to hide the action.

“If you think I made all that up –”

“Nah, nah, I believe ya dude!” he cried hastily. “It’s just – a bit out there, you know?”

Lisa shrugged. “Mm, I can imagine. Anyway, now you know what you wanted to know.”

The boy nodded seriously; for the first time, he had a look of mild intelligence on his face, as though he was formulating some kind of theorem.

“Can I use your phone, then?” Lisa pressed.

The boy nodded again, and moved over to the other side of the room, where a mountain of dirty jeans and black band T-shirts nearly reached the height of the window. “My mobile’s in my pocket somewhere … gimme a sec …” he grunted. “So you’re calling the Guard?”

“Yeah,” Lisa said. “I’ll try my parents again, and if I can’t get onto them, I’ll call Marina.”

“That’s the chick that goes with Raikou, yeah?”

Lisa stifled a half-laugh. “Yeah, that’s her.”

“Right …” he trailed off, hunting in the pockets of a pair of jeans with white spray paint splattered over them. He stood up rigidly suddenly and looked at Lisa with a bemused expression on his face.

“Can I just get this straight? You’ve been attacked, like, how many times now?”

“Pretty sure I’ve lost count,” said Lisa blankly.

“But they’re attackin’ ya because you can open Suicune’s Chamber of Secrets?”

“Sepulchre,” corrected Lisa.

“Yeah, whatever dude. But that’s the reason they need ya?”

“Yes …” Lisa said slowly. There was a dogged clarity in his tone that unnerved her, because she had no idea where he was going with this. “What’s your point?”

“Ah, nothin’,” he muttered indifferently, finally producing a grubby white mobile phone from the pocket of a pair of shredded jeans. “There ya go – make yer call, don’t take too long though ‘cause I don’t have much credit left.”

Lisa took the phone in the palm of her hand but didn’t dial.

“Come on,” she said presently. “What was your point? Where were you going with that?”

He sat back down on the edge of the bed. “I woulda thought that’d be obvious, dude.”

“Well it’s not!” snapped Lisa impatiently; among other things, the fact that he continually referred to her as ‘dude’ was rapidly growing tiresome. “What are you saying?”

The boy began to pick nonchalantly at his big toenail. “Well, I just reckon … if it was me … I’d just go to the Chamber of Secrets myself and get the fucken key thing once and for all and just – get rid of it. Destroy it. Give it to the Guard. Whatever. But once the key’s outta there, your value’s gone right? The Union wouldn’t need you anymore; they’d go after the Guard instead.” He stopped dead at Lisa’s gawking expression. “Is it just me or does that totally make sense?”

Lisa felt nerves prickling at the back of her cerebellum.

“I don’t think it’s just you,” she said, her arm falling limply by her side. “But – I don’t know where the Sepulchre is.”

“Well, who does?”

“The Union, obviously. And – oh!”

Lisa clapped a hand to her mouth in sudden comprehension. The memory of the topographical chart in Larry’s office at the Union’s headquarters had swum back to the surface of her mind. Electrified, she remembered the royal-blue pin stuck into the map. There was no way to be certain – but maybe …

Lisa’s heart began to pound in excitement. Looking vaguely nonplussed, the boy raised an eyebrow and kicked a black jumper over to join the pile of dirty laundry. “Right … well … I’ll be out on the patio when you’re done,” he said, gesturing to the phone. “Come join … we’ve got a good view of town.” He left.

*

For some time, Lisa Walters sat on the bed of the stranger whose name she still hadn’t asked for. The grubby white phone was warm in her hand, but she was rapidly losing the desire to use it. Her mind was bubbling with new possibilities, new choices – choices she had never even realised she had …

If I entered the Sepulchre of Suicune without anyone knowing … If I could get the fragment of the key on my own terms …

She recalled her father’s words in the makeshift hospital ward at the Fairfax Inn:

“ The Union wants to break into the shrine. To succeed they’re going to need all seven keys. But what we want to do is protect the shrine, prevent the Union getting in. And to do that we need only to deprive the Union of one single key, one single fragment, even, to succeed.”

Lisa’s heart seemed to be climbing into her throat.

My fragment.

Her mind was darting wildly from one thought to the other: it was as though a beam of light were bouncing hysterically off the inside of her skull.

The Union was everywhere. The Guard had been compromised. The authorities had long since been corrupted.

MY fragment.

The comprehension came thick and fast. The Safe House – the Guard’s plans for her … it wasn’t the only way. All of a sudden, she had something she had never realised she had before: the power to make a choice.

I don’t have to be a pawn anymore.

Lisa stared at the face brick walls of the depressingly small bedroom, her mind processing the enormity of her newfound clarity. Barely aware of what she was doing – and yet keenly focused at the same time – she had taken her black jumper and spread it out over her lap. The orange logo of the Ecruteak Fruitbats was still visible, despite the large hole that had been rent in it by Sterling’s Murkron’s attack. Lisa ran her fingers over the damp jumper, tracing each letter of the logo as though she were in a trance. She remembered lazy Sunday afternoons clustered around the television family room watching the game and cold winter nights when she had huddled beneath the bulky warmth of the thick fabric. She ran her fingers up to the edge of the hole that Murkron’s attack had made and pulled at the fabric – gently, gently – until, slowly, it began to tear further. The black fibres of cotton were rent apart as Lisa gripped one hand on either side of the jumper and pulled harder. There was a neat, almost zip-like sound as she tore through the middle of the orange logo, and further still, past where her belly-button would be, until, with the crisp snap of the last, stubborn, stringy thread, the jumper was torn completely open, exposing its innards.

Lisa breathed in slowly, her skin breaking into goosebumps, and realised that she had to move before she fatally second-guessed herself.

She stood up abruptly, the shredded jumper tumbling to her feet. Her eyes fell on the lurid yellow-and-black poster by the bed:

SO YOU’RE JUST GONNA ROLL OVER AND GIVE UP LIKE YOU ALWAYS DO? OR ARE YOU FINALLY GONNA GET MAD AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?

She kicked the jumper off her foot with a loud cry, jettisoning it into the pile of dirty clothes across the room; her heart pounding, she pulled the Surf Life Saver shirt from her body and hurled it with an aggressive “argh!” at the same pile before stripping off her sodden jeans and lobbing them into the mess too. She sifted through the pile, extracted the most shredded-looking pair of jeans she could find and pulled them on. They weren’t a perfect fit, but they would hold up. She then hunted through the top of the pile and found a ridiculously oversized black T-shirt emblazoned with the image of a white skull and neon green writing that proclaimed “The Decay”. A savage grin emerging on her face, she threw it over her body, immediately aware that she smelled like pungent day-old smoke, but she had never cared less.

Throwing the bedroom door open, she wheeled into the dingy hallway. After stepping into a couple of unused spare rooms and the toilet, she eventually found her way to the drab white bathroom. She hunted through the drawers until she found an enormous red-handled pair of scissors. Gathering her long ebony hair up into a ponytail, she opened the scissors and moved them up and down the length of her hair, trying to work out where to make the cut. She looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw that her face was pale, her mouth quivering slightly. She took a deep breath in and moved the scissors higher up than she had ever intended, above shoulder length, before wincing and closing the blades down on her hair.

It was more awkward than she had anticipated: it was as though her hair was too thick to be properly cut through the first time. She ended up hacking at it slightly haphazardly, tendrils of shiny black hair tumbling to the grotty tiles as tears began to streak down her cheeks. She surveyed her red-eyed reflection again and gruffly wiped her eyes on the sleeves of the T-shirt before reaching for the top drawer beside the basin.

The teenage boy was sitting on a sun-damaged deck chair on the brick-paved patio, his head tilted back as he took a puff on his joint. As he exhaled calmly, his eyes opened and fell on Lisa standing, feet apart, before him.

The joint tumbled from his hands and landed on the bricks, leaving a trail of embers in its wake.

“Duuuude. What the hell did you –”

“Where’d you keep your bleach?” Lisa cut through him.

“Wha–?”

“The hair,” said Lisa, gesturing to his shoddy, damaged blond hair. “It must be your work, right?”

“Uh – it is, it is – I’ll help you find the bleach …” he muttered, hunting beneath his chair for the joint. He seemed to have difficulty tearing his eyes from her. “Uh – I forgot to introduce myself, by the way … I’m Jamie.”

She smirked.

“I’m Lisa.”

[Sike Saner]

Wow. o.o That was one heck of a chapter there. From the part where Lisa got to really thinking about Jamie's little suggestion regarding her key, things just got really powerful, really memorable.

All of a sudden, she had something she had never realised she had before: the power to make a choice.

I don’t have to be a pawn anymore.

Loved that bit. ^^

Further on the subject of the aforementioned key-related suggestion... I do wonder if it's really gonna turn out to be the brilliant solution that Lisa currently seems to think that it is. But then, I always tend to have some degree of doubt about such seemingly brilliant solutions.

At any rate, this is quite the interesting turn things have taken here--I'm really looking forward to seeing what follows. ^^

[Gavin Luper]

Wow. o.o That was one heck of a chapter there. From the part where Lisa got to really thinking about Jamie's little suggestion regarding her key, things just got really powerful, really memorable.



Loved that bit. ^^

Further on the subject of the aforementioned key-related suggestion... I do wonder if it's really gonna turn out to be the brilliant solution that Lisa currently seems to think that it is. But then, I always tend to have some degree of doubt about such seemingly brilliant solutions.

At any rate, this is quite the interesting turn things have taken here--I'm really looking forward to seeing what follows. ^^

Hooray, I hoped you'd be back to read this!

I'm stoked that you liked the chapter so much, and in particular the line where Lisa says she doesn't want to be a pawn anymore - because that was one of the two sentences that I was struggling with prior to posting the chapter. It's rather redeeming to know that it was a well-received line.

More on the key-related solution to follow! In fact, from this chapter onwards things start to accelerate quite rapidly and get pretty exciting, in my opinion at least. I hope you'll like it.

Thanks again for reading, Sike!

I should also add that I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this November, to make another 50,000 words of progress on finishing off LTL completely. It's already progressed a long way from what I have posted, but there's still a way to go before everything's tied up and finalised neatly.

With that in mind, how often would people like to see new chapters posted? Sike, specifically, but if there are still some closet readers out there, I would so love to hear your feedback on how frequently you would like to read a new update! I would like to pump them out on a weekly or fortnightly basis for a while - would that work for you guys?

Please please please let me know ... it would be awesome to get some feedback not just on the recent chapters, but also, on how often you would like to see the new ones put up.

Cheers guys - oh, and in the spirit of Collingwood winning their first AFL Grand Final since 1990 on the weekend - GO PIES!