[START OF URASARIA ACADEMY: YEAR FIVE]
[IRIS YEARS]
[ARC 27: A HOST IN THE FAMILY]
It's often owing to the grip of the past that most of life's difficulties lie. The trap of this clutch biases us, despite our attempts to see objectively without it and patterns that we try to examine so that we might see less murkily in the future. Reaction is determined by past weight, and when one remembers the real they seek to refine it. Yet the primary flaw of memory is not what it forgets, but what it creates or imbues, regardless of how stiffly we might seem to steady its illusion.
Perhaps that is why it has remained difficult for humans to do little else with the future but project idealized versions of their current selves into it. We are process, and a rock that we continue to send skipping because the last pattern of our touch has told us that it is good.
So, it is the same with this novel, having evolved from the original intention of only following Mia Schultz. To renew it, with a new first-year, has proven difficult. But that is quite like a thing: to be on the cusp of it, and then, to fall back again with no progress made. Start in the middle of a drama, and the reader will care more for that fleeting plot than the characters it emerges from. Start without drama, and one risks the reader clicking out in boredom. So, it has been rather difficult to start it again.
Let's try something like this:
Daigo Yashukure was dead, and Iris Valentine's summer job truly sucked.
There were a lot of lesbians in the area who liked her because they knew she dealt with plenty of bullshit in her personal life, and she happened to be physically attractive & fit. She had a long scar across the back of her right shoulder, which she always claimed to be from a fight with another host. Her hair was short, wavy and palely green, her hands callused from a lifetime of sports & hard work.
All traits she was proud of, and ones she had used to brag her way into several beds over the years. She viewed her sexual adventures as a currency by which she validated herself: her ability to attract and be attractive. Whenever she saw women being harassed, she would go over and threaten to put down whoever it was, pretending she was some type of famous Urasaria student ready to be offended if she wasn't 'recognized'.
If it isn't clear, Iris Valentine did not attract the most mentally stable women.
However these personal hierarchies, professionally she was treated like shit. She had received her mechanic certification at 19 and had been working here for a year, before she was to attend Urasaria. It was technically illegal, although the laws say Revenant-created products, not Revenant-created services. She had delayed her entrance to Urasaria, primarily because she felt things of herself needed to be brought to the fore before.
In recent months, however, she was talk-hungry for other hosts.
"Iris, where'd you put my ½?" he shouted at her from across the auto repair shop. "IRIS!"
She walked over. "What? What ½?"
"My ½ socket is missing, I've been scrounging around looking for it for ten minutes. This isn't the first time someone's taken shit out and hasn't put it back, either. You were over here, earlier, where'd you put it?"
"If you've been looking for ten minutes, why'd you just call me over now?"
"God damnit, don't get funny, Iris. Maybe it was that goddamn spider of your's. I saw how you all lose control over shit like that constantly. Least that's the type of shit you say after accidentally killing twenty people."
"Oh, what are you on about this time? What? You think students are just going around massacring civilians?"
"Don't say it like it doesn't happen, asshole. Ever looked at what's going on in Russia lately? One student went over there and nuked half the fucking place. You don't think they're showing off how they could do the same thing here?"
"Let me get this straight." said Iris. "You think the United States government is preparing to nuke half of their own country?"
"Not preparing, they're *showing* they can do it."
"Why?"
"What the hell else? To scare people. A scared population eventually falls asleep, and a sleeping population'll never fight back. That's what that head bitch over at that academy is all planning, and don't think she won't bend you over and fuck you sideways too."
"Oh, right. I should've picked up on all this. All your conspiracy news bullshit."
"Mainstream. I'm talking CNN, bitch."
"Well, guess that just shows that watching the news is like a mirror: if an idiot looks in, a genius can't look out. You still think Swarm's the one who *nuked* Russia, despite that she already said the only reason she was taking time off was 'cuz of her family. Maybe she brought that goddamn socket with her, too. I'll tell her to bring the whole goddamn drawer next and really wind your ass up." said Iris. "And by the way, if I was the government planning on controlling a sleeping population, I wouldn't use a nuke."
"Oh, what'd you use?"
"I'd plant about ten people like you in every city and feed them a whole bunch of bullshit about Urasaria. I'd hire some *ex-students* to talk about what really goes on there. You, being a rube, would spread it and sucker in about a thousand other equally stupid dipshits, and pretty soon you'd be more focused on conspiracy theories about lesbians who nuke formerly communist countries instead of child poverty, police brutality, whistleblowers getting locked up in jail. Then I could really fuck up anyone I'd want to, cuz you'd be too distracted."
He paused for a good six to seven seconds, then said: "Hey, don't you talk bad about the police. I've got a brother in the force. All that police brutality shit is because people just refuse to listen."
"Yeah, I'm sure. I don't know why I put up listening to you."
"Same for you. Least you'll be out soon."
"Yep, I sure will. And by the way, if you actually did think I'm going to murder everyone here in some type of host rage, I'd think you'd want to treat me with some more respect. Maybe I'd spare you, eh? That's what I don't get: you got all this shit in your head about what hosts think like and what they do, some of it I've never even heard of. You think you're so insignificant I could get away with killing you and yet you're so important you've uncovered this vast conspiracy no one but you knows about? That I've got so little to do around here that I just antagonize you by moving your fucking sockets around? Get fucking real."
He said nothing and continued rummaging. Iris rolled her eyes and walked back over to another coworker, muttering: "I swear, if someone told him to go clean the bathroom, he'd walk out ten minutes later covered in shit with the plunger stuck up his ass."
"Well, anyway. I figured out what it was, Iris. Something got caught in their dryshaft -- slung over and broke their post O2 sensor."
"You want me to revert it?"
"If you think you can." He took a small tube-like sensor off a tray and handed it to her. Little could be said about this sensor that has not already been said about Afghanistan: bombed out and depleted. Phantom's eyes peered into it and repaired it. "Thanks. Anyhow, I got a gift for you." He held his hand out and dropped a ½ socket into Iris's. "I lost mine and took it out of his drawer."
Iris just stowed it in her pocket for now. Phantom had failed less of late, a fact she was pleased by as much as her coworkers usually were when it did fail. The longer she had worked here, the more even innocuous gestures were subsumed under that schema of behavior.
Despite her frustrations, this always worried her; in her actions and behavior that she still needed to remember to pay mute tribute, to be physically non-threatening enough that they would not report the place for hiring her. But of late this boundary had been getting worn down to the blood.
"You can put the skid plate back on once I finish with this."
"Fine."
Soon she was shouted over to another truck in the building.
"Iris, can you lift this up for me? I gotta check something real fast."
Iris went over, hitched her hands under one side of the vehicle, and tilted it up. Not all coworkers were shitty with her, at least, and the work was generally easy for her. It had been a convenient way for her to still make a salary while collecting her Urasaria stipend. "You got it?"
"Yep." He slid out from under it and she lowered it, slowly. As he passed behind her, he shuddered and said: "Damn, Iris, that thing still scares the hell out of me."
"Who, Phantom?" An enormous spider, the size of Iris's torso, was latched upon her back. Its legs and spinneret eternally weaved ethereal strands, and it had one million eyes. "Aww, I don't know. I think she's cute." She turned and it crawled over her body to her chest, as she pet it.
"You got one hell of a mind calling that cute."
Iris smirked. She sat down -- on nothing in particular, merely stopped air as Phantom's legs continued. "I'd make a seat for you, but I doubt you'd trust sitting in it."
"You'd collapse it as soon as I did and tell me it was the spider. Besides, we've got that new policy: he doesn't want us sitting down when customers come in. Especially if the chair's invisible, miss."
She looked out to the lot. "Well, there he shows up. Always seemed unfortunate to me that we've gotta get here early and he doesn't. Lemme go see what he wants."
Her boss opened the door to his truck, cursed to himself some, then was calling Iris over to him while she was already halfway.
"What is it?"
"Iris." His breath smelled like the downwind off a brewery. "Iris, I gotta show you something here, 'fore I forget. I was out with some buddies last night. Boy, we were gettin' rowdy. We had all those little Miller pony bottles in the back, and... well, make it short, we went to a gentlemen's club. God damn, Iris, you gotta check out the girls they got there sometime before you leave. One of 'em had this trick where she could make it whistle."
"Make what whistle?"
With the secrecy of a John Le Carre spy thriller he whispered: "*It*." He showed Iris a picture of her. She was about as erotic as an open sore. "Don't go burning a hole starin' at it." He clicked his phone off. "You just think, Iris, when you get to the academy, you'll be having girls as sexy as that all around you. Some of 'em'll even blow you."
Iris's mouth stiffened. "Maybeso."
"Well, or whatever lesbians do to each other. Fill me in on what we've got today."
She walked around with him and updated on new orders & jobs, in-between her usual menial Phantom-assisted work. The most tedious of tasks usually fell to her; it was rare for her to get her hands on a car despite her certification, aside from reverting the rust and debris from tires. Once she finished driving one around for ten miles to see if there was any humming like one customer had said (there was not; most likely the humming was caused by latent psychosomatic disorder), she came back in and took her break to eat outside.
Soon after her boss did as well, and asked her for updates on her well-being. Iris suspected it was mostly to get out of his own work, but no matter, she talked with him anyway. Since he had hired her he had not been using his hands much, yet the business remained a line of pride for him. He had once said to her:
"I tell you, Iris, all those college people want to look down on an honest living like this, but they don't know a goddamn thing about cars. If people like us went on strike, the whole world'd shut down in two weeks. Nobody would be able to drive anywhere. But them? You think anybody'd care if a bunch of damn professors went on strike? All that philosophy ain't real work."
His firm plant in reality tended to be the attitude Iris most picked up from him, even while he often tried to shed his attachment to it through alcohol.
"But I'm tellin' you, Iris, you go down there just once. Hell, I'll take you. Oughta get some fun in before you're at that academy. How long you got till then?"
"I'm moving in August." She glanced back to the shop. "And I'm not saying I haven't appreciated being here, but I'll be a bit glad when I'm out of here. I know most of 'em don't consider me one of them."
"Well, I've seen a bit of that, Iris, but nobody but Mike means anything by it. Hell, I used to know this kid in school who we'd give a whupping to anytime we saw him. There's always gonna be some type of hierarchy, Iris, and people who're down it hate people who're up it. That's how businesses and gangs work. … Still, I don't see no reason why they should be treatin' you the way they do."
"I know why."
"Why, 'cuz you're a lesbian? Hell, that don't mean nothin'. You like a nice pair of breasts and good pussy just like any man here."
That was precisely the issue, she thought: that her attraction to women was not objectifying. "Because I'm a host."
"Oh." He scratched his chin, usually looking like he had shaved it with a broken bottle. "Well, Iris, some of that's… some of that's natural. There was that time where you broke someone's hand just for touching-"
"No, that wasn't what happened, damnit. He smacked me on the ass, and I waited that whole night until he was going back to his car. I didn't need anyone seeing me. I had Phantom slam his car door on his hand a few times. What the hell else was I supposed to do, just let him grope me?"
"I understand, Iris, but you know people who aren't hosts, we... we don't see the use of violence that way. Hell, I wouldn't've minded if you smacked him, but that..."
"Other lesbians don't mind me telling that story." she mumbled, a little defensively.
"Alright, but you gotta realize that when you told that to people here, they didn't see your motivations or reasonin' behind it, they just remember that action. And just last month you almost got into a fight with that student who came by here to check up on you. People saw that."
"I just don't like surprises."
He stroked his chin. "…well. You'll be leaving in two-three months. I'll see if I can put those boys right. Hosts, sure, but you ain't a host. Least not in the sense they're thinkin' of it."
Iris shrugged. "Probably'll listen to you better than me."
She went back inside and continued her work, and as she got in her truck at the end of the day, she inhaled, placed her hand on the door, closed it, and let it go with all before. Checking if anyone was looking, she gave the door a punch that pulled it outward, then reverted it to normal. This method of anger was typical for her when she was denigrated or minimized; one that had become more stamped upon her the more she knew she probably should ignore it.
Yet there was her uncle, who seemed to be drinking again, and she felt a bit of obligation to be presentable at work, at least for her family. She sometimes worried that when she left, without the obvious advantage she provided, work would slow and he would go bankrupt. She did not even necessarily love her uncle; he had mostly been put in her life rather than chosen to be in it. Oftentimes she was needed to get him out of a mess he had no clue he was in.
On her drive home, she saw a mural that read 'Dana & Dakota 2020 - 2021 - 2022'. Sometimes she enjoyed pasting herself into the thought of a relationship like this, but today she just seemed resentful of it. Despite her attractiveness, she had never quite been able to parlay it into romantic success. It was not due to a lack of suitors, but that a reserve tended to keep her back from full attachment, owing to a lack of location in her life. The longest relationship she had been in was four months.
So she placed her hand on the radio, and let it tune to static her day.