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by Nyohah
It was humid, Jade noted with some distaste, standing in a square-shaped outdoor area that might have been a courtyard had it been larger or contained any plants�tropical ones would have been fitting, although it was not really so hot. The humidity more than accounted for a few degrees.
"Eww," said Tanya, behind Jade as she emerged from the portal, which had opened just above a drainage grate in the center of the area. "The air's sticky."
Of course, Jade would have traded humidity for an escape from her female colleagues any day. One could only be expected to endure Tanya for short periods of time, and Kitana's polite nature and incessant good intentions got on her nerves quickly, especially after days of almost constantly being in her presence. Kahn had decided that constant togetherness could help mold them into a fighting force that behaved as one. Perhaps Jade could work in that manner with Tanya if she never opened her mouth and with Kitana if she unlearned that she was the Edenian princess, but Mileena? With the complete mystery of the intentions behind any of her actions, mundane or uncommon, to say nothing of the innate and almost bestial ruthless character of her nomadic side? To be stuck with them at any time was guaranteed irritation; to be stuck with them and humidity was almost too much to bear.
"Why did Kahn send us here?" Tanya continued whining. "I don't get it." She folded her arms with a pout.
"I believe this is some sort of education institution, Tanya," said Kitana. "Regardless of Kahn's reasons for sending us here, if we learn how this place works, it could help the Edenian people immensely."
"Why do I care about the Edenian people?" Tanya asked.
"You are the Edenian people," replied Mileena in her low, grainy voice, rubbing the blades of her sais in seeming boredom and nonchalance--or, Jade wondered, was that a carefully constructed appearance? "Although I doubt even that makes them matter much to you."
"How about we just find our contact?" suggested Jade. The sooner they started their tour the sooner their tour would be over and the sooner she could escape . . . well, the humidity, anyway.
"Let's try the big entrance," said Tanya, pointing to a set of black doors under a newer-looking section of building that vaguely resembled a chapel.
"It looks almost like a place of worship," said Kitana. "What do you suppose that circular symbol near the top means? It looks like a stylized representation of some sort of wild cat."
"Maybe they worship cats in this silly place," said Mileena, her arms crossed, tapping the tips of her sais on her shoulders.
"Put those away," said Kitana as she opened the doors. "We don't want to frighten them."
The quartet of female ninjas stopped inside, gawking at the skylight two stories above them.
"I don't think most churches have skylights," said Jade.
"If they worship cats, they're not exactly normal," answered Tanya.
"Is there a bat flying around up there again?" asked a new, somewhat high-pitched, quiet voice. Jade and the others looked down to see a teenage girl with long, straight brown hair, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and jeans.
"Who're you?" said Tanya.
"Your tour guide," the girl answered, then muttered, "against my will. I actually use seminar to do my homework and what happens? I get ripped away from it to drag some people around the school."
"Homework?" said Tanya.
"Seminar?" said Kitana. "Is that another religious function?"
The girl raised her eyebrows. "Work you're assigned to do out of class, and no. My name is Nyohah and welcome to high school. This is the commons area, where we eat lunch. It was actually built into a gap between the buildings when our renovation started, so it's the newest part of the building. However," she said, pointing to the ceiling by the left wall, "even though the roof here is only two years old, there's still a leak. Nice to know that our construction is high quality, huh?"
She walked back to the doors the fighters had come through.
"Tour's over?" asked Tanya.
"No," Nyohah answered. "We're going to the band room." They went back outside, to the area the portal had been, and went in the north doors instead of the east. In the entryway, a scraggly-looking man with tools on his belt stood looking up at the ceiling from which a waterfall of gray water was tricking into a rapidly growing puddle on the floor. "Well, isn't that nice," the girl said, walking past the mess.
"Does that happen often?" asked Jade.
"You'd be surprised," Nyohah answered, yanking open a door. "And this," she said stepping into an odd-shaped room filled with teenagers goofing off or working on various subjects, "is the band room, officially known as the instrumental music hall, but since band outnumbers orchestra five to one, the wishes of the minority get trampled. As you can see, down that little hall are the lockers where we keep our instruments. And out here," she said, stepping into the large portion of the room, "is where we rehearse." As the ninjas followed her, the students in the room noticed them, a boy who was walking before they entered tripping over his feet and almost falling at sight of the barely clothed women. The sound of something metal hitting the floor dinged in the sudden silence.
"There goes thirty bucks," said Nyohah in the direction of the sound, then continued with her explanation. "There used to be a swimming pool here, but about twenty years ago the ceiling started to fall in and bring asbestos with it, so they locked it up, and didn't fix it until renovation started three years ago, when they just filled it in and decided, 'Screw the swim team, they can just keep using the slimy pool at the "High School on the Hill" three miles out of town...that's what we call the county college, 'cause classes there are ridiculously easy. The ceiling's slanted 'cause we're under the grandstands for the football field. Questions? No? Let's go."
Tanya opened her mouth once, and they ran after the girl.
"Gym's in there," she said, pointing to the doors opposite the band room doors, "but we can't go through because the P. E. teachers might kill us for walking on their floor."
"P. E.?" asked Kitana.
"Physical education," said Nyohah, dragging them back out of the door and hurrying back to the commons area.
"Physical education?" Kitana asked again.
Nyohah ignored her, speed walking through the commons area and turning left where it branched into an L shape. "We'll go to this wing, now, and then upstairs."
"Ooh," said Tanya, stopping to gawk at a mural made from carved bricks, making a three-dimensional form of a jungle cat.
"These people do worship cats," mused Mileena. "Inane."
"What?" said Nyohah. "No, we don't."
"Then why are they everywhere?" said Tanya.
"The panther is our mascot."
"Mascot?" asked Kitana.
"It's a symbol that we use to represent our school."
"That's even sillier than worshipping cats," said Mileena.
"Yep." Nyohah turned right. "That hall there with the new floor tiles is Senior Hall, where the students in their final grade have their lockers. The class straight ahead is the journalism room. Down the hall to the left are computer classes and sophomore lockers. When I was a sophomore my locker was clear at the end and it sucked. Not as much as not being able to take backpacks into the foreign languages classes, but close. Upstairs."
She herded them into a stairwell, trotting up the stairs that were too short for comfortable ascending and that forced the ninjas to mimic her awkward-looking movements to keep up with her.
"That," she said, pointing to her left as she exited the stairwell, "is the balcony above the commons area that serves no purpose. And that," she pointed straight ahead of her, "is the site of the hardest class in our school, AP English IV." She walked to the right and pointed to either side of her. "This is Freshman Hall, site of all language classes and home of all stupid freshmen."
"So freshmen are those who are mentally deficient? Don't you think you should treat them with a little more respect?" Kitana said, irritation evident in her tone.
"No, no. Freshmen aren't mentally challenged. They just all lack two little things called common sense and self-sufficiency."
"Ah, so that's what they call people like Tanya," muttered Jade.
"It's nothing personal against them, well, for the most part. I'm sure even I was stupid as a freshman. I mean, after all, I did take choir and then try out for sophomore choir, thus condemning myself to another year of misery."
"Couldn't you have decided not to join after you tried out?" said Jade.
"Our choir teacher's a rather vicious woman. I didn't want to find out what she'd do to me if she gave me a spot and then I didn't fill it. But I wasn't as dumb as these freshmen. At least I knew to walk fast and not loiter because some people need to get from Nepal," she pointed downstairs to the area her locker had been her sophomore year, "to Quebec," she pointed to the right of the upstairs hall, "in six minutes."
"Aren't those on opposite sides of this continent?" asked Tanya.
Nyohah blinked once. "Nepal's in India. That's in Asia."
"Yes. So?"
"This way," she said with a quick shake of her head, then walked left down the hall to a classroom.
Ignoring the stares of those inside as they looked up at the visitors in sync, Nyohah pointed the ceiling, to a tile that was discolored yellow and rounded downward. "And this is what happens when construction workers put in a new ceiling before they bother to fix the roof."
"That's entirely without logic," said Mileena, then turned to Kitana. "You're sure we can learn from these people?"
"Hush," said Kitana. "Continue," she said to Nyohah.
"To add to the illogical behavior is the fact that this is the third tile here, and they probably still haven't fixed the roof. Downstairs."
They rushed the other end of the hall and took a different stairwell down. "This is the other side of the offices. Newly constructed, of course." Seeing that Mileena stood with her hands on her hips, shaking her head as she stared at the arrangement of shiny black tiles on the floor, Nyohah added, "Yes, that's another panther. And that," she pointed to right, "is the auditorium, which was probably the room that needed the most improvement, and guess what, got the least."
A person came out of the stairwell behind them, not the first person they had seen, but the first who paid them any heed, stopping just in front of their group and looking them over with a snort. Her turquoise tank top had only one sleeve, but she wore it over a white one that had both.
"Out of the way, skanks," she said, pushing through and walking to the office.
"I resent that," said Nyohah, pulling at her T-shirt. "I'm not a skank. Do I look like a skank?"
"Do we look like skanks?" asked Jade.
"Yes."
"What's a skank?" asked Tanya.
"You are."
"Want me to kill her?" asked Mileena.
"Who?" Nyohah asked. "Tanya or the skank who insulted us?"
One of Mileena's eyebrows raised slightly, evidence of her amusement. "Both?"
Nyohah shrugged. "I don't care as long as this tour doesn't take me any time past 2:58. I have a home to go to, time to waste, and a chem. formal lab to not finish until lunch tomorrow."
"So she's a skank, too?" asked Tanya, semi-oblivious and pointing in the direction of the office.
"You don't mind being labeled a skank?" asked Nyohah.
"Should I?" Tanya looked suddenly distraught.
"Nevermind. Now, if we went around that way," she said, pointing, "you'd get a glimpse of the parking lot, which only has room for about half the students' cars. Major parking problem. But we're going to go this way instead, as we're going to go gaze upon the wonder that is the safety shower."
After reaching an area of the school where the classrooms all had large windows looking into the hallway, Nyohah pointed to a classroom in the center. "That's the site of the second-hardest class in the school, AP Calculus. But the safety shower's over here." She walked to the corner, and pointed in a window that opened into a triangle-shaped room, much too small for any classroom.
"That's this marvelous safety shower?" asked Jade.
"I was being sarcastic," replied Nyohah.
"It looks older than Shang Tsung," said Mileena. "And that's impressive."
"I'm sure it's been there since this area of the school was built, and I'm sure it's never been pulled. No one is ever allowed to pull the safety shower except in an emergency unless he wants to incur the extreme wrath of the chemistry teacher, who is almost as capable of extreme wrath as the choir teacher."
"What would happen if I pulled the safety shower?" asked Tanya.
"You'd get all wet," said Jade.
"And dusty, probably," said Nyohah. "I meant invoke, I think," she said more quietly.
"What?" said Kitana.
"You couldn't get in anyway. That door's locked. We'd have to go around, through the classroom."
"So let's go around," said Tanya. "I want to pull it."
"Everyone wants to pull it. But I don't want to get my head bitten off, so you'll just have to suffer like the rest of us." Nyohah turned them away from that window, to the one further in the corner. "If you look in this window, you'll see a prime example of our district's waste of money."
"Where?" said Kitana.
"The TV mounted on the wall. Yes, the nineteen-inch TV mounted on the wall on a two hundred and fifty-dollar stand. Multiply that by the number of classrooms, because every one is getting one, and you get a large amount of money that could have been used to fix up the field house, which has, like, twenty leaks in its roof and doesn't have heating anymore and has never had air conditioning."
"Must be tough," said Mileena, sarcasm evident in her voice.
"Hey. It gets really hot here, and it gets really cold here, and we are a spoiled generation. Now, what else do you want to see?"
"I'm hoping that you have much more to show us," said Kitana. "We haven't seen much. Certainly nothing helpful."
"Oh, you wanted to see things? She wanted to see things," she directed to the other ninjas. "She came to Kansas to see things." Then, directing her voice back to Kitana, she yelled, "Why'd you come here if you wanted to see things!"
Jade was slightly shocked by the girl's pitch. For how quiet the girl's voice had been until that point, when she wanted to be heard, she would be heard.
"There is nothing to see!" she continued. "This is Kansas! Look: wheat! Look: wild sunflowers! Look: I can see all the way to the horizon and there's nothing between me and it! If you want to see something, either don't come to Kansas, or go to the Cosmosphere. It's the only place in the entire state worth your time!"
"You shouldn't be so disrespectful of your homeland," said Kitana.
"I've lived here sixteen years and I've been better places, like Hawaii, where it's never gets over eighty degrees or under sixty, and where's there's sand and sun and an amazing lack of humidity and bugs, and I'm sick of this place and--"
"What's going on over here?" demanded a new voice. It belonged to a woman taller than any of the ninjas and certainly taller than their guide; her skirt came only to her mid-calf, short enough to look awkward and tacky.
"What are you ladies doing in this school?" continued the woman, some sort of authority figure. "Where are your visitor passes?" she said to the ninjas. "You can't just run around during seminar like this," she said to Nyohah. Then the woman gasped slightly. "Are those weapons? You can't weapons in this building!" The volume of her voice raised in finality. "You're not adhering to the dress code! Out of this building, now!"
She turned to their guide, "And you, back to your seminar class. What do you think you're doing?"
Nyohah pulled a piece of laminated paper out of her pocket. "Press pass," she said, then walked away.
The woman nodded once then redirected her attention to the ninjas. "Out!"
They got out.
"Earth women are unstable," said Mileena as they walked down the alley back to the site of their portal.
"At least they're prettier than you," said Tanya.
From the hiss that escaped from Mileena, and went unnoticed by Tanya if her lack of reaction was any indication, Jade thought Mileena was apt to kill Tanya on the spot.
Maybe that was just what she hoped.
"Kitana," she said, "are you sure this kind of thing will help the Edenian people? I know we didn't see much of the classrooms, but--"
"We saw enough," said Kitana, "to know that it could never help the Edenian people."
The portal opened before them, and Kitana asked, "Who's first?"
"Tanya is," said Mileena, and she spun quickly, ending the spin with a high crescent kick that smacked against Tanya's jaw and sent her, yelping, into the portal.
Kitana frowned. "That was uncalled for."
Jade only laughed.
"I must make sure she has not been hurt. She is our ally, after all," Kitana said, almost incredulous, then stepped through the portal.
The portal flickered for a few seconds, then disappeared. Jade snapped her head over to glance at Mileena.
"I really don't want to go back," Mileena said.
Jade smiled slightly under her mask. "How about we go to this Cosmosphere place our guide spoke of."
"Why bother with that when I've got a better idea," said Mileena, raising one eyebrow. "A place with sun and sand and without humidity and bugs . . ."
*~END~*
This work is the property of the author. Comments regarding this work or any portion thereof may be sent via the email link at the top of the page. :^) Certain elements are � Midway Entertainment.