Back from California. Doing makeup work. ಠ_ಠ I don't regret missing school, though, Disneyland was amazing. C:

But on the bright side, this fic is almost at 100 reviews! :D

"I wonder what you're doing, I wonder if you doubt it, I wonder how we used to ever go so long without it ..."

~Marianas Trench, Cross My Heart

Legend, Track 13: Cross My Heart

"Um, Fran? You okay?" I asked, bending down and poking the boy in the shoulder. He stirred slightly. I looked up at my mom. "Where're his parents?"

"They're across the street, moving their things in," my dad contributed helpfully. "I'll go get them if you want."

Fran began to wake up. "Ow. My head hurts..." he groaned. "What's going on?"

"Never mind, he's coming to," I threw back over my shoulder. My dad nodded and whispered something to my mom; the two of them withdrew from the kitchen and I saw them disappear out the front door. Sure, leave me with the awakened guy. Thanks a lot, Mom, Dad. With a sigh, I knelt down on the ground next to Fran and resumed poking him. He sat up.

"Darn. It happened, didn't it? I was hoping it'd wait for a bit, like, until after I'd gotten used to my new house..."

"What happened?" I asked suspiciously.

"I got awakened," he said matter-of-factly. "Aren't you supposed to have awoken by now, too?"

"Wait, what? You know?" I asked. I'm pretty sure my mouth was hanging wide open at that point, but you know, a lot's happened over the past couple of months. You can't expect me to remember everything that's happened.

"Yeah, my mom caved from guilt and told me when I was about ten," he said, getting up and dusting himself off. He extended a hand down and helped me up. "I was kind of annoyed at first that I got Yoshi, of all the random characters to get, but I learned to live with it." He shrugged. The doorbell rang, and he looked over to the window. "Hey, is that another container at the door?"

"You seem so blase about this whole thing," I noted. "We were really freaked out about it when we first got the news." I opened the door to see Pit, Link, and Tony. "Hey, guys, meet Fran. Fran, this is Link, Pit, and Tony."

"Container?" Pit asked me.

"Yoshi," Fran contributed.

"You know already?" Pit asked, making the same expression I'd made a few minutes ago. Fran explained quickly, then added at the end, "Luke gave me a call right before we moved over here. He told me to give you guys this." He held out a folded piece of paper. "It's some sort of list, I guess. It has a bunch of names on it. I'm somewhere on there."

"It's a list... of containers. And their years. So four of them are seniors, four are juniors, nine are sophomores, eleven are freshmen, and the other eight go to our old school." Pit looked over my shoulder as I scanned the list. I passed it over to Link, who read the list as Tony jumped to see over his shoulder."This'll be helpful, thanks, Fran," I smiled.

"No problem," he said lightly. "I'll be on my way now, see you guys around."

"Well. That was odd," Pit commented as Fran exited the house. "He knew everything, and he wasn't freaked out by it at all. I wonder how he reacted when his mom first told him."

"It's a lot more than our parents ever told us," I shrugged. "Mine only caved and told me after I confronted them about it; his mom just went and told him."

"True," Pit replied. "Well, I'm off. I'm gonna stay up all night playing games and stuff. See ya!" He exited, Link and Tony close behind. I caught a snatch of their conversation before they left, and couldn't help but wonder what the heck Tony had been watching lately.

"Yeah, that sounds like a good idea," Link said. "It's Friday, after all."

"It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend~" Tony cheered.

"Ugh, shut up, Tony," Link groaned as he opened the door. "I regret ever showing you that video."

With a shrug, I headed for the refrigerator and pulled out some dinner. After giving it a quick nuke in the microwave, I sat down and ate, then went upstairs, took a shower, and went to sleep. Yeah. Exciting, I know.

The weekend was good. It was Labor Day weekend, so we all got to sleep in for three days, and spent the entire weekend apart for once. Adam visited from Melee City, and regaled me with tales of his adventures in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I nodded and smiled, not having a clue as to how to tell my cousin that my friends and I were living out the real-life Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and it wasn't quite as fun as playing the video game was. Pit went to visit his aunt Palutena in Sky City, and Link and Tony went to the mall and the movies. Link told me later that he saw Z and Ike there, but refused to say anything more than that.

The second week of school was uneventful. Fran turned out to be in a few of our classes, and he helped us find some more of the people on the list. By lunchtime on Wednesday, we had figured out which Smashers were sealed inside the people in our classes, and we started to make a plan to find and awaken them.

"There's still the chance that people will think we're on drugs or something," Pit mentioned to us as he pulled his lunchbox from our locker, then handed mine to me. "I mean, that's what I thought. We all thought that," he added, indicating himself, Link, and me. "Did you, Fran?"

Fran shrugged. "I was still at the age when I believed everything my parents said when I got told, so I wouldn't know." I slung my backpack over my shoulder, Pit and Link picked up their bags, and we traipsed down the stairs to the cafeteria. Link left us to go through the cafeteria line, while Pit, Fran, and I settled our stuff down at our usual lunch spot. Roy, Mark, and Peter were already there, chowing down on cafeteria hamburgers; Z was still sitting on the other side of the cafeteria with all her choir friends.

"I wonder why the cafeteria's so divided," Peter wondered, taking a bite out of his PB&J sandwich. Jelly gushed out of the sides of his sandwich, and he made a face at it as he continued. "I mean, look. Here in this quadrant of the cafeteria, you have the band kids; diagonal from our quadrant, you have the choir people; in the quadrant on this side next to us, you have most of the health and fitness people; and then on the fourth quadrant, you have all the other people who aren't involved in anything or just feel like sitting there." He sketched out a small map of our cafeteria as he spoke, then passed it over to us. It was a crude square, labeled with the words band, choir, h&f, miscellaneous, and had little stick figures randomly populating each quadrant.

"There's been a rivalry going on between all the different electives since my mom went here," Roy contributed. "She was in band, she was one of the drum majors. She told me that all the kids in the different electives hated each other on principle; the worst rivalry's always been between choir and band, though. They were always playing pranks on each other when she went here."

"That explains all that toilet paper in the band room the other day," Link nodded.

"And why the choir room got TP'd yesterday," Fran added.

"Yep," Roy said, looking proud of himself for remembering that story.

"And Z switched from band to choir... Did our school have such a strong rivalry between band and choir?" Link asked us. I shook my head. "Not really. The band was a lot bigger at our school than the choir was, because the choir teacher was insane, remember? If there were any choir kids who disliked the band, I never heard about it." Pit nodded.

"So this just made me realize something. It's going to be a lot harder to recruit people from choir, now that we know about the rivalry between band and choir. Recruiting people from health and fitness will be okay, but choir people... that could be troublesome," Fran observed.

"I can blackmail them," Peter offered, holding up his precious laptop. "I bet I can find something!"

"No," everyone said at the same time. Then: "Jinx!" Roy, Mark, Link, Pit, and Fran yelled.

"We're in high school now, you guys," I sighed, as the usual "pinch-poke-you-owe-me-a-coke" routine began. I winced on Pit's behalf as Link pinched him. (Hey, that guy never cuts his fingernails, okay? They're like... like wolf claws or something.)

An outburst of music briefly interrupted the pinching and poking, and something in Pit's backpack vibrated. I reached in and pulled out the old 3DS. "Huh. I wonder what it's doing..." I flipped it open and poked at the buttons for a bit, until it sprang to life and delivered its message.

"Tabuu is coming. You have sixteen days. Get going," I read. "Great."

"Oh, joy," Pit grumbled.

"Homecoming game's in sixteen days," Mark observed, gesturing to a garishly sparkly poster on the wall. It said Spirit Week is September 20th through 24th! Homecoming Game - September 24th! Homecoming Dance - September 25th! Be there or be square! "And the homecoming dance's in seventeen. You guys gonna go?"

"Ew, no. I don't do dances," I said. Pit and Link shrugged.

"There was someone I was going to ask, but she's going with someone else, probably," Link said glumly.

"Ooh, drama," Roy said. We stood up and started the walk to the band room. We passed a few of the creeps I mentioned earlier— Boris King, Ward Wallock, and Gavin Dragmire— and we skirted as far around them as we possibly could.

"It's like a shoujo anime," Pit rolled his eyes. "Y'know, the guy likes the girl but the girl likes, and is going out with, another guy, but the girl slowly comes to realize her feelings for the first guy, and that's what the whole anime's about... and then if you're a yaoi fangirl you pair up the guys and throw the girl out into the cold." Link punched him. Hard.

"Owowowow!" Pit stumbled around dramatically, clutching his arm, as Link glared at him. "Link, how could you do this to me? I thought you loved me!"

"Yep, straight out of one of those sappy shoujo anime," Peter said, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Rolling my eyes, I grabbed Pit's undamaged arm and dragged him away from Link before he could make more of an idiot out of himself. The rest of the walk to the band room went uneventfully. Unless you count the couple of other bruises that somehow appeared on Pit's arm.

"But seriously," I said, dropping Pit's arm as we arrived at the band room, "how are we going to get to the others if they're in choir?" We stowed our backpacks and went to get our instruments out.

"We're going to have to make a plan," Fran said.

"We'll talk about it later; anyone up for hot chocolate after school?" Pit asked, passing me my flute case and reaching for his saxophone. Fran stood on his tiptoes and grabbed his clarinet, while Link, Peter, and Mark headed to the back of the band room to set up their instruments (snare drum, bass drum, and bells, respectively). I nodded, then went to my seat and began to put my flute together.

"So, as you sophomores know," Mr. Sahashi, the band director, said, "every year at the homecoming game, the band does a field show at halftime. This year, our field show's theme is Revenge of the Nerds; you can go look it up on YouTube if you want. Since this field show is kind of complicated, there'll be extra practices after school on Mondays and Thursdays. Everybody got that? Good. Now, section leaders, count how many people need each part and then come up here..."

Oh. This could be problematic, I observed mentally.

You got that right, Samus replied.

About that "Friday" thing that Tony did... Don't kill me.

I realized it was Friday in the story and I couldn't resist.

/stabbedandtonfa'drepeatedly

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