This needs help. Another part is the remedy!

Chapter Two

RP walked back to her dorm building with Esquire and Rae, who were arguing, er, discussing, whether the MCU or Star Wars was better. RP was disappointed that she had to work with the unpleasant older girls. Her conscience nagged her that if she had been less sarcastic they in turn would have been nicer to work with, but her mind dwelt more on the server program that just wouldn’t compile.

It was a little warmer than it had been in the morning, and other students passed by, chatting, enjoying the quiet Saturday. The girls were in the old side of the campus, surrounded by green grass and quaint brick buildings.

“Marvel has Hawkeye. Case closed,” Esquire said.

Rae ran ahead of them on the wide asphalt path. She started impersonating the Avengers . “I have a metal suit and can fly at superhuman speeds. I turn into a giant that can rip up buildings. I shoot arrows. Yay!” She spun around, laughing.

RP marched up to Rae. “I am here to conquer the world!” she said in a deep voice.

“Pew! Pew!” Rae mimed shooting a bow.

“Puny archer.” RP pretended to punch Rae, who collapsed dramatically, almost hitting the secretary, Miss Allens, who was leading a man and a couple of younger girls, RP guessed on a tour for prospective students.

“I’m so sorry!” Rae said, and RP added her apologies.

Miss Allens reprimanded them, but RP’s attention was caught by the older of the two girls. “I think that’s one of them,” she was saying quietly to the younger girl, nodding towards RP.

“Shh!” said their father.

The groups parted ways. “That’s what you get for making fun of the coolest superhero of all time!” said Esquire, coming up to the others.

But RP paid little attention. What had the girl meant? Did RP remind her of a celebrity or something? Because I’m just so famous, RP thought. She put the encounter into the back of her mind, and entered the dorm building.

Aw I like it! I can just imagine the campus! It sounds so nice... 

MCU forever! Although, Star Wars is cool to, Marvel is way better. No offense Rae!

Since this is topped (and I'm loving writing this!) here's part something!!

--- 

RP said goodbye to Rae and Esquire, and went to her room to code. The wall above her bed full of art, some by RP, some by other artists she just enjoyed. On the other side of the room, Elementgirl, her roommate, had decorated with a mixture of charts and whimsical illustrations, not to mention a huge periodic table.

RP plopped down on her squeaky swivel chair and flipped open her laptop, realizing almost immediately that her server wouldn’t compile because she had forgotten a capital letter. It always seemed to be the little things.

“What are you working on?” Elementgirl came in with a bottle of sparkling raspberry juice.

“Server-client communications using sockets,” RP explained, spinning around to a chorus of creaks to face Elementgirl, and then spinning few extra times for good measure. “Basically, using local networks to send messages between computers. ”

“That’s really neat!” Elementgirl took a sip of her drink. “Hey, have you seen my book anywhere?”

“Nope, what is it?”

“It’s called The Treekeepers, it’s about an orphan girl who has to go overthrow the evil ruler of the land--”

“How can a ruler be evil?”

“What?”

“It just measures things, right?”

“Haha, not funny.” Elementgirl smiled.

“Yep, you’re totally not entertained at all. Can I borrow your laptop real quick?” All students at Wilson Hill were issued laptops.

“What for?”

“I want to try out my chatroom program going between the computers.” RP was already getting her computer’s IP address and transferring the client program to a flashdrive. “It works if I put both ends on mine, and I mean, that’s super exciting, but, well...”

“Sure.” Elementgirl flicked her blonde hair over her shoulder, and dug out her computer.

A few minutes later, RP sent her first message to Elementgirl’s computer. “Greetings, earthlings, prepare for invasion!”

“It works!” Elementgirl announced.

“Finally!” RP grinned, typing rapidly. “Anihillating earth in 3… 2… 1…”

Elementgirl laughed. “I think you spelled annihilating wrong.”

“Sorry, spell check isn’t until version 8.4” After RP did some more testing and rewrote it so that the program didn’t crash if a user left the chatroom, she returned the laptop. “Now we can send messages to each other whenever we want!” she said sarcastically.

“Or we could, like, talk.” Elementgirl gulped down the rest of the raspberry water, and put the bottle by the door to put in recycling.

Someone knocked at the door. “Can I come in?” asked Lilypad.

RP replied in the affirmative. Lilypad was the sort of person who popped up all over the place, always with something new to say or play or do, and even though she was a few years younger than her, RP could hardly tell a difference.

“So, Quirker and Myles found a cool site and I wanted to show it to you guys,” Lilypad said, excited. She opened her laptop and flopped on RP’s unmade bed, the other girls looking over her shoulders.

“What is it?” RP asked.

Lilypad typed in the web address, classywhale.com. “It has a bunch of really fun videos.”

The page was taking forever to load. A whale icon was half filled with turquoise. “Sorry, Chrome is always so slow,” Lilypad said.

That hadn’t been RP’s experience. “Maybe it’s just all the videos?” She glanced over some fine text under the whale, but it was just a bunch of copyright stuff.

Elementgirl started. “Wait a minute. Lily, this is from--”

“Oh, oops,” Lilypad said, closing the browser and slamming down the top of her laptop. She was very pale. “That was the wrong site.”

“Yes, I think it had a virus.” Elementgirl said.

“And of course everyone can tell there’s a virus from a cheesy whale icon.” RP said.

Elementgirl was staring into space, but it almost looked as if she were focusing on something RP couldn’t see.

“The fine print, you know.” Lilypad’s blue eyes darted around rapidly. “Yes. It’s quite common… the copyright date… a give away…”  

Elementgirl had composed herself. “Lily, let’s go tell Quirker and Myles about this.”

“Alright, sure.” Lilypad and Elementgirl left the room before RP could say anything else.

RP opened her laptop. How were you supposed to detect a virus from the copyright date? Determined to figure out what this site was really about, RP pulled up Chrome. But as fate would have it, the internet was down. In fact, that had never happened before in all of RP’s days at the school.

After the network settings and restarting the computer could fix nothing, RP decided to go to the common room.

RP walked down the hall. She heard voices around the corner.

“Just remember, the setting is the most important thing-- oh, hello.” It was Clouded Leopard, from the writing class, walking down the hall with Elementgirl and Lilypad.

They all stopped walking, a little surprised. What was Clouded Leopard doing with RP’s friends?  

Clouded Leopard never lost her composure. “Now, girls, next time you want writing advice, ask Miss Elliott, not me. Where did you say Myles was?”

“At the track meet,” Elementgirl said promptly.

“Climbing the big oak, right out that way,” Lilypad said at the same time, pointing down the hall.

“Oh, that’s right. I thought you said Esquire.” Elementgirl corrected herself smoothly.

RP was not a little confused.

Clouded Leopard rolled her eyes, and went in the direction Lilypad had pointed.

Elementgirl shook her head. “She’s so commanding,” she said confidentially to RP. “Sorry about leaving you-- I was sure there was a virus; it was so slow loading.”

“Well, the wifi’s down anyway,” Lilypad said. They walked down the hall while RP tried to think of a logical explanation for her friend’s strange behavior. “What’s the weirdest food you’ve ever eaten?” Lilypad asked to break the silence, and the rest of the afternoon proceeded as normal.

In the evening, the wifi was working again. When RP tried to go back to the site, it had disappeared from the face of the internet.

“This has been a very strange day,” she said to herself.

“This has been an exceptionally bad day,” Clouded Leopard thought at the same time.

“Because of the word indescribable, we can describe anything,” Booksy Owly thought meanwhile, and smiling, got out her notebook to write it down.

Jolly good ol' chap! *tips hat* 

Oooo, creepy! Didn't LilyPad actually make a thread about the moat disgusting thing you've ever eaten? that made me laugh. 

Ooh, I like it! Good work, Sho.

Chapter Three

The pond was blue on that Sunday afternoon. Booksy and Clouded sat on a bench facing it. They had been quizzing each other on their French, but now watched the ripples spreading on the water. A couple sixth or seventh graders were trying to catch the minnows in their bare hands, without much success.

“Treble Clef! I got one!”

“Really?”

“Oh wait, it got away.”

Booksy smiled at Clouded, who was braiding the tassels on her bag. When they had been in sixth grade they would have been more likely to be off writing a story together in a cozy cranny.

“Remember the adventures of Lela and Emily?” Clouded said. Those had been the characters of their ongoing series of stories.

“How did you know I was thinking about that?” Booksy asked. Sometimes they knew one another so well it just seemed like they read each other’s minds.

“I’m a mind reader.”

“You did it again!”

Clouded smiled. “Well, I was just remembering book one, which wasn’t really long enough to be a book, actually.”

“Oh yes! How they met each other and discovered the necklace--”

“Which was just randomly in the attic for some reason--”

“And then they went to Alondria--”

“And when Bluebird heard us talking she thought we were saying laundromat!” Clouded finished.

They laughed long and loud, and the younger girls looked over their shoulders, curious.

When the friends had written their stories, they had taken turns writing from their own character’s point of view. Booksy’s character had been Lela, a fearless tomboy who had the convenient power of reading minds. Emily had been a shy, artistic girl, who could talk to trees and heal people.

Looking back on the two and a half stories they wrote, the girls laughed at the silliness of their plots, and even moreso at their grandiose schemes of publishing a twenty-book series and making some feature films to boot.

Those were good times, Booksy thought, slightly nostalgically. This spring they would graduate from WHA, and though there was a vague possibility of attending a high school focused on the arts together, Booksy’s parents were pretty sure that issues of money and distance would get in the way of that.

They had stopped laughing, and Clouded again was staring into space. Booksy wondered what her friend was thinking about. I suppose Lela’s power would come in handy now, Booksy reflected. Perhaps I gave her that because it was what I always wanted.

There was something more Booksy wanted, something she almost felt that Clouded had but she couldn’t quite put her finger on. A sort of inner firmness. They had talked about most things together, but Booksy’s speculation about this felt too unclear to put into words.

The frustration of the fleeting idea, the sense of Clouded’s betterness overwhelmed Booksy’s mind. She gripped a wooden slat of the bench so hard her knuckles were white. She hardly thought of the reason when she spoke, raising her voice from a whisper to almost a shout. “Why are you this way? Why? Why?!”

“What?” Clouded blinked at her.

“I-- I’m sorry.” What had happened?

A certain subtle reserve that had long disappeared from their friendship returned to Clouded's countenance. "Did I do something?"

"No, no." Booksy rested her forehead in her warm hand. She'd never had any sort of outburst like that before. Why was she so upset with Clouded?

They said nothing until the silence became unbearable. 

"I'm not feeling well. I should go see the nurse." As Booksy said this, the lie became truth with a piercing headache.

"Oh... okay. Shall I... go with you?"

"No, I'm fine."

Booksy walked off, still baffled, and leaving a worried friend behind.