Scribble Ninjas

Ever since I met Villette, I couldn’t get her out of my mind; it was so maddening that it was irritating. Those in the Veritas class were never of particular interest to anyone in the Society, and I’d never taken an interest in any of them before, so why now? It didn’t make any sense.

Nevertheless, I found myself searching constantly.

In the hallways.
In the cafeteria.
In the Workroom.

… As if my eyes expected to catch a glimpse of her figure passing by.

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I took another puff from my joint and the smoke continued to fill my dinky apartment. I sunk deeply into my sofa, wondering how my life had turned out like this: living alone in a shit apartment with a girlfriend who has a mouth the size of Russia.

Bottles and cans of alcohol had spread out across the floor. I groaned, too tired to clean up the mess I’d let accumulate for months. Isn’t this what girlfriends were for?

I must have dozed off because the sound of a knock at the door had awoken me. I ignored, feeling much too tired to get my lazy ass off the couch. The knocking soon gave me a slight headache, causing me to slowly peel myself from the couch and approach the door.

“I don’t want it!” I yelled at the door, expecting it to be some damn salesman.

“Travis!” a shrill voice came from through the door.

Speaking of girlfriends…

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Maybe that was what I liked most about him, the fact that we never talked about anything serious.

The broken teacup shards littered the floor. He stilled, his ears straining for sound – but she didn’t move, of course she wouldn’t move, she probably hadn’t even noticed that it was broken. She couldn’t see from where she was. And even if she had, she hadn’t gotten up for days…

It was an infectious thing, this state of mind she’d gotten herself into, so he could feel it too. It carried throughout the whole house. Sometimes it felt like the walls were caving in on them from the heaviness in the air.

Other times, it felt like she saw right past him – not that he could tell, but she never really felt there. And even though he knew it was highly unlikely she would have moved from her chair, he was always surprised to stumble into her there the next morning.

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Previous chapter.

Clickety-clack. This is how I get paid. By how much clickety-clacking goes on behind my desk. There are at least twenty of us Veritas sitting in a white room full of identical cubicles with identical chairs and identical computers. We’re running through the same program, sorting data and rearranging information from the Society’s Intel with nothing but the sounds of our keyboards tapping.

This is what the Veritas class is good for – silence and efficiency. Nothing else, nothing more.

The clock hands skimmed along the surface, making endless circles around the center. Even that was muted, as if a single disturbance in the air would disrupt all our working. We didn’t even look at the clock, except times we caught the hand moving out of the corner of our eye.

I clicked through file after file, typing in a few words here and there before sending it to the correct processing programs. I didn’t know where the information went from there, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t our job to wonder.

At five o’clock sharp, we simultaneously came to a stop as the computer screens blanked to black and the whole room fell into complete silence.

Next chapter.

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Some housekeeping things!
1. I'll no longer be telling you when to post your collab parts. Just post whenever you want during your month, ideally toward the end!
2. I don't know if you've noticed, but I've been including links to the previous and next parts of the collab. If you could do those links yourself, it would save me a lot of time :D Same for tagging stories.