Over the course of a couple minutes, the crowd dispersed. As the sound of footsteps filled the air once more, murmurs continued to spread, most, however, leaned into the ear of those nearest to them to lament something along the lines of how “Class Zero gets treated so well by the guests.” Their slight envy with nowhere to go but their hearts as they watched both Nyssa and Celeste receive affection that they never did.
Unlike Angelica and Roxanne, who had been very aware of the murmurs—but paid them no mind—Celeste and Nyssa finished up the conversation none the wiser, waving goodbye with happy smiles and heading back into the festival hand-in-hand.
With Roxanne resting her head on her shoulder, Angelica played with her girlfriend’s hair while keeping her eyes on Nyssa and Celeste’s retreating figures. “How nice it is to be young. I... kind of miss it.”
“Do you really think so, though? You were the student council president, a full-time student, and worked a job. You had no time at all,” Roxanne retorted, elbowing Angelica in the side. “I would know, you didn’t spend any time with me after we started dating.”
“Yeah... but now that I’m an adult, I’m just as busy, if not more. I just didn’t know how to manage my time as well in the past,” Angelica looked down at her hand, twirling her phone with it. “I miss it the most because even when we were so busy, we could at least work while sitting across from each other, and sleep in the same room at night.”
“Mn, I get that,” Roxanne closed her eyes as her gaze wandered downward and a sigh left her lips. “I’ll try and spend more time at home as well, okay?”
“You’re just too competent though, the government wants you too much,” Angelica teased before fixing her expression. “Open your eyes my dear, there are some more students coming.”
“I want to find one of Roxanne’s guildmates, Gideon,” Nyssa’s eyes reignited once they finished eating lunch. “If we don’t have anything else to do, I’d like to... but I’m also fine with doing other stuff first.”
“Then mind if we do the ring tossing booth first? It’s right up ahead,” Celeste pointed forward, an excited smile dancing across her face. “I’m also fine with finding Gideon first, though. Up to you.”
“No, no it’s fine, let’s go do some ring tossing,” Nyssa ushered Celeste forward. They wove through the crowd, and, once they made contact with the man running the booth, they came to a stop by the booth’s edge.
“Welcome, welcome, young ladies, I’m here to offer a very fair, very easy ring toss game,” The man spread his hands out. In the process, he let a shower of rings fall from one hand to another. “Your destiny lies within your own throwing ability. Who’d like to go first? All these prizes from small to large are all up for you to grab.”
“I’d like to go first,” Celeste laughed, a rare excited light dancing behind her eyes. She bobbed her hands, and once he handed over five rings, she couldn’t help but to break out into a wide smile. “Watch and learn Nyssa, I’m secretly the ring toss master.”
Raising her eyebrows, Nyssa stood off to the side, watching with a keen interest a Celeste took her position. She crouched down by just a hair, focused her eyes onto the specific hook she wanted, and tossed it by sweeping her arm outward in one clean motion.
The ring, as if guided by a string, clattered off the hook’s edge and fell onto the wooden board signifying a ‘no prize’ result.
“What a shame, what a shame, you were so close. I’m sure you’ll get it on this next throw,” The man’s eyes twinkled. He picked up the ring, flicking it upward and sweeping his arm to the side before setting it down on top of the pile. “Go again whenever.”
After the third ring missed a hook by a hair’s margin, bouncing off of it a similar way to the first two, and clattering onto the wooden board, Nyssa bit her lip. It seemed... rigged. Well, she knew more carnival games of this sort had the odds stacked against the player, but this one seemed... supernatural almost.
The ring’s trajectory would bend like a banana, curving and making a near sharp turn near the end. A herky-jerky movement like a patient with a neurodegenerative disease.
Seeing Celeste’s eyes quiver and hands shake a touch, Nyssa felt the urge to transform well up within her. What if...? What if she changed her eyes into something able to see the truth?
“I shouldn’t...” Nyssa scolded herself. A looming darkness spread through her mind, a bone-chilling cold enveloped her from behind as she felt her fingers go numb.
Angelica’s warning from just a couple days ago resurfaced once more, overlapping with Kaiser’s warning repeated all throughout her childhood.
“Don’t transform into something you don’t know the price of. You never know what your powers might demand.”
I haven’t remembered that for years, why now...
Nyssa stared at her hands, mystified as to why her father’s words had come back to haunt her years after she had familiarized herself with transformation.
“Nyssa! I’ll make you proud!” Celeste hyped herself up, snapping Nyssa out of her trance. Her hair transformed and her eyes began to shine as she began emanating a starry glow. “Watch this!”
In one clean motion, the ring went blasting forward. It shot out wind currents in its wake, blowing back both Nyssa, and the booth owner’s hair.
“And a second!” Celeste whirled around sending the fifth and final ring right behind the first. “When encountering trouble, underhanded tricks, or otherwise, just blast through it with unrelenting force. That’s what I learned from Ryker.”
Celeste’s show of force, though, ended up blowing the booth’s entire cloth roof off, only leaving behind the booth’s wooden frame as the man behind the booth’s counter clutched the rest of the rings against his chest.
The two rings, though, sat snug on the centermost hook, signifying two prizes of the highest level.
“Maybe... Maybe I went a little overboard,” Celeste paused, looking over to Nyssa. Nyssa, who could only muster a wry smile, inched closer to Celeste as the surrounding students began congregating around them.
“Let’s get going,” Celeste coughed, rushing forward and grabbing two of the prizes off the booth’s table. Sticking next to Nyssa, she pushed through the crowd as another round of murmurs began to spread about them and their antics. “My reputation is never recovering from this... I don’t want to be known as Ryker 2.0...”
“You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine,” Nyssa comforted. “Though I didn’t expect for us to be popular... they’re always murmuring about us.”
“... Yeah, you’ll get used to it,” Celeste swept her hair back with a half-happy, half-sad smile. “Nothing is that private, they’ll find out all your secrets soon enough.”