Chapter 1: Railed and Derailed Broin
It was in the first third of Environmental Science that Zoey finally got an idea of how a flame from Hephestus' underwater forge would be transported. The god would've created an anglerfish anamatronic and the flame would be placed into the esca of the machine, and air would be fed through the illicium. Tyson would be on the inside of the anglerfish, as he's strong against fire. Percy would be on the outside to protect thr cargo.
Normally, Zoey would be paying attention to her favorite class. But the topic was frogs—currently how the presence of frogs can be used by researchers to determine the health of the surrounding ecosystem.
Oh, now she was thinking about that dude who bred frogs and released them, thus allowing the amphibians to destroy the ecosystem. He was in the U.K., she thinks.
Wait, why was she not paying attention to frogs again?
Right! She already knew a lot about them—but obviously not as much as turtles—because of when she tried to give a girl a frog as a gift in kindergarten. The girl had screamed and thought "it was poisonous" and to "keep it away" because she "didn't want to die".
Zoey tried to then explain that the frog wasn't poisonous, but would still make the girl sick if she ate it. The girl had confused poisonous and venomous. Zoey got in trouble with the teach—
'Notebook!' Zoey interrupted her own train of thought and put it on a new rail. 'Right, I need to write down the plot point'.
She flipped to the next blank page in her spiral and spun the page 180°. Upside down writing was for lyrics or fanfiction ideas when she didn't have one of her notebooks. She tried to keep those ideas in notebooks, but she would tear out the pages from her spiral and put them with the notebooks to transcribe later.
Zoey held her pencil in her mouth as the words started to word in her broin. Well, the words decided to word enough for her to add details aside from the original plot point that she conjured up.
"Trauma builds character," Zoey assured herself as she make a special note to give Percy a guilt complex for not immediately saving Tyson. She turned her spiral the note-taking way.
The teacher was still talking about frogs and ecosystem health.
The spiral was spun again as Zoey decided to write lyrics for a song about nature. Or maybe a poem was better.
'If we are stripped of our core
Then we can understand more
More of the us on the inside
The part that we all hide
Who wishes childhood wasn't done
The one who ran through trees
Who said hello to birds and bees'
Oh, fun. This was starting to get depressing. Zoey needed to schedule another appointment with her therapist. That is, once her next check came in.
Based on her calculations, she had worked exactly 33 hours and 45 minutes. She refuses to stay even a second longer because this job doesn't have overtime.
Getting back on the preferred train of thought, simce she gets paid 16 an hour...
"16 times 33 is 528," Zoey calcuated as she wrote on the upsude down page. "And three fourths of 16 is 12."
540 dollars for the past two weeks—well 13 days technically. She liked technicalities. They—the technicalities—were fun to argue. Not actual arguing of course, she hated real arguing. For too loud, and when someone realizes they're wrong, they attack her instead of defending their perspective. There was no point—
She had to work 5 hours later since she picked up a shift from someone who had their time-off request denied, but wanted to go to a nephew's birthday party. They should've requested off earlier, but Zoey had nothing else to do considering she finished her schoolwork for the rest of the week and next.
It was easy to lock-in when she was interested in something. Anyway, she'd end up with, "620 dollars," Zoey said with a finality usually reserved for when she was done destroying her adversary in a rap battle. Wait, she'd get money for winning the battle on Saturday.
Well, her therapist's office only charged her 38 dollars considering what she did for them in the past. She was 100% the favorite.
She looked up when someone bumped into her desk. Oh, class is over already? She shrugged and put her now unflipped spiral into her bag correctly. Well, 'correctly' for her organization system.
Since countless things can be done differently and get the same result, does it matter what is called 'correct'?
"I need to refill my legally prescribed drugs," Zoey told Yesn't. The stuffed turtle that hung from a zipper on her backpack was helpful by staring back blankly.
"Thank you for your help," Zoey said to Yesn't as she walked out of the classroom.
Her next class was Mathematical Thinking in two hours and... She did math outside of the class quickly. Two hours and 43 minutes.
Okay, she had time yo see if the teachers had unlocked the next batch of assignments. Wait, she did that before last class, and the dashboard reset at midnight. She had free time to do the thing that required for her to be able to function.
'This is better than drugs.' Zoey gave herself a pat on the back—literally—as her other hand unlocked her phone with the 19-digit code.
4294294666739825 was not something people would be able to guess. The FBI would have to try and hack her phone if the groupchat got leaked.
Zoey opened up the hell-site with a manic gleam of excitement. She uncapped her TMNT pen with a florish as she grabbed a notebook and the pages torn from the ES spiral.
"Let's to this, Mikey," she whispered as she set off on transferring her fic ideas. Not really 'ideas' per say, but the words that decided to word for a bit.
"You know, Yesn't, I find it funny and cool how for TMNT that each of the weapons for the boys is, like, directly opposite of, well, them," Zoey admitted to her audience of three—Yesn't himself, the smiling pen in hand, and the judgemental bird staring at her like it knew what she was reading on the way to school.
The FBI was not allowed to see her AO3 history.
"A stick for the tech nerd," she quoted one of the lines from a WIP that had been sitting in her Tumblr drafts since 2015. She wouldn't delete it, she sword she'd get back to it!
The properly—for her system—unflipped spiral went in her bag as she greedily pulled her notebook closer.
Time to turn on the underwater blender.
