Cross-eyed -5minutefreewrite, Nanowrimo, a Chibera story

For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-377-5-minute-freewrite-thursday-prompt-cross-eyed

Here we go! This is the beginning of the National Novel Writing Month. I will be writing a novel. Hopefully I will cross the word threshold line, which means I won't be using only 5 minutes each time. But I am not going to worry too much about, well, anything. Here's entry number one (chapter one?)

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Cross-eyed. Janice had hoped that the SAT test would be easy. That all here tutoring would have made it a piece of cakewalk. But she was going cross-eyed, just looking at the dozens and dozens of questions, and all she could think was, piece of cakewalk?? She knew, deep down, that "piece of cakewalk" wasn't the phrase. And she furthermore knew that it probably didn't matter that she couldn't think of that particular phrase, but her brain was fixated. "Piece of cakewalk" she whispered it to herself, even. A short-haired girl, probably the same age as her, duh, but who had perfected a 65 year old woman's glare used it on her. Janice returned her glare with a stare. Her brain was frozen. How many minutes had passed? All of them? Was the timer about to go off, and she hadn't even read the first question? She looked up at the clock. 30 seconds had passed. Oh. Piece of cake. Oh! That was it. Or "walk in the park". Or, a cakewalk was a thing, but she wasn't sure what. Either way, her brain was unstuck. Time to read the first question. The first question. Oh no. The words were swimming. NO now was not the time. She was going to Yale or Harvard or Bryn Mawr or Oxford... Oxford didn't care about these answers, but they were still important to heeeeeerrrrr.

---

Jan leapt nimbly from the tree. She hadn't been too worried about the leap, but she knew there wasn't much time to do it right. Done. Onto the next tedious task assigned by the tree lords. Fwwoop
Jan chuckled to herself. There was worry in the forest, concern that they would lose themselves in the fight to understand her if she overcame their obstacles. "Don't worry, lords, I'll be a kind arbiter." Her voice carried more sarcasm than she'd intended, but so be it. If TONE were so important, they should set bardly tasks, not these ranger exercises.

A broken branch. If ever a man had made this mistake, she'd eat his hand. No, this was some clumsy gobbler, trying to draw her into its trap. They thought themselves clever, the gobblers of this land. Perhaps she'd even find herself facing a Longlegs if she followed the false path. Gobblers would come later, after she'd been drained to drag her off. symbiosis
Jan startled. That word had not come from her own mind. As she came to understand it, it was as if the word had been explained to her in some foreign tongue, elvish perhaps, that had similarities to her own... a brain that understood the way she understood, but was not her own. And Symbiosis, yes, that was the right word for the thought. But it was not the right word for her.

"Telepaths," she muttered. Why in the world were telepaths interfering with her treetests? It couldn't possibly be because of any desire on their part to participate. They stand apart purposefully. A renegade? If that was so, it could wreak havoc on the whole of Chibera if it was not stopped. And who could stop it but another telepath? And if telepaths were going to stop it, why hadn't they yet? Oh. Was it already too late? Had the great wreckoning begun? Is this where she would end up in the whole thing, a tool of the apocalypse? No, she must fight it.

---

Pencils scritched paper. The sounds of circles being filled in. The soft turning of pages. The math portion of the exam lay before her, half-finished. She checked a few of the answers that she didn't remember answering. 9 out of 10 looked right. She couldn't tell if the tenth one was right and she'd double-checked wrong, or if it was wrong, and her double-checking was right. She decided to leave it. After all, maybe her subconscious knew something she didn't. Or maybe that was dumb, and of course she should trust her conscious thought. Regardless, how had she answered questions about math while she was dreaming about symbiotic fantasy creatures?

It all started... well, as far back as she could remember. She'd told her dad stories about Chibera when she was a toddler. He'd written some of them down, but they had come too often and too fast for him to write them all down, and eventually she'd stopped telling them, because he'd seemed concerned. When she was very little, he'd kind of accepted the idea that she had a very active imagination and that these adventures had come alive for her, but as she got to be school-aged, and had continued to tell the stories without structure, even though she'd learned about structure in school, and had been given notes on them, her insistence that she couldn't tell them a different way because, "That's just what happened," began to make him ask more questions that she could tell he was scared to hear the answers to. Like, "When you say 'that's what happened', why don't you make something else happen?" when she'd gotten so scared she'd asked him to stay with her all night so she didn't disappear. Of course, he did and she didn't, and as she grew older, she realized she wasn't actually losing much time in the real world. In fact, her body seemed to go on autopilot and time barely moved, but she was sure, sure that these weren't the mere day-dreamings everybody assumed they were. These were things happening in Chibera. She was as invested in their world as she was in the "real" world.

The math exam hadn't finished itself while she thought about her history with Chibera, unfortunately, so she turned her whole attention to it. "Five minutes" called out the auditor, just as she finished the last question. She went back to question 10, which she wasn't sure of, and which she didn't even remember doing. Wrong. It was definitely wrong. Her subconscious apparently didn't remember ...wait. No. It was right. The formula she'd memorized was wrong. Crap. Crap. Did that mean that she'd gotten a bunch of other ones wrong? Was it impossible to trust what she remembered because memorizing isn't math?

Ugh, she hated to get lessons from her subconscious, and yet, that's all it ever seemed to give her.

"Time. Pencils down. You will now have a 10 minute break. You may leave the hall. Restrooms are near where you entered the building. Drinking fountains are next to the restrooms. The Writing section begins promptly in 10 minutes. Time will begin then. Anyone not in their seats will not be given extra time."

Janice rushed to the bathroom. Gotta get back, gotta get back she thought very consciously and repetitively to herself. She had no idea if it would work in this situation, but she sure hoped if Chibera overwhelmed her conscious mind that her subconscious would get this directive and take her back to the hall and begin working on the writing portion of the test at the appropriate moment.

No need to worry, though, she realized as she settled back into her seat. Or rather, there was plenty of cause to worry, but nothing happened. Like preparing for a large disaster, there's only so much you can do, and then you get to celebrate when there's not even a disaster.

Janice copied her name and other identifying information onto the cover of the writing part. She was looking forward to easily beating her dad's SAT score. When he'd taken the SAT, what, a hundred years ago, he would've joked, there wasn't even a writing section, so you couldn't get higher than a 1600. So even if she bombed the other sections, which she hadn't, there was still a good chance she could beat his meager 1420. Ha! She gloated to herself. Dad was still her role model and hero, but she couldn't say what he would've thought of her love of gloating. He didn't seem the gloating type, he was so self-effacing, but his outward interest in saying self-put-down things might have just been a front for all the secret gloating that he did. She didn't know for sure, but she knew that's what it was for her. She was gloating basically constantly, and nobody knew it... she thought.

---

Jan laid perfectly still under her cloak. Perfectly still and entirely smug about it. The tree lords had surely sent these Eagle Men for her. They probably nested near the world tree and just loved to give trialers the what-ho and the whoop-whoop on behalf of the tree lords. I'll be such a good auditor She thought. What? She baffled herself, and her confidence crashed. She was still sure the Eagle Men would need to see her to find her, but suddenly her brain wasn't sure it even knew what it wanted. I want to be an arbiter she thought fiercely, what the heck is an auditor? Again, as if a creature that spoke- not elvish, she was sure now- spoke with her brain, though without her words, gave her a clear image of the official looking fellow in a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a soft salt and pepper beard, and standing tall then sitting to read something... read? Yes, understand the symbols that came pre-written in a wooden, no paper, but made of wood? A book... called "The Dragon and the George"...

Jan, an instant from gasping for breath, maintained her composure. The damn telepath was back, and it was going to make her reveal herself. Not by paining her, as she'd been prepared for, but by baffling her. By showing her impossibilities and new words and by making her be not herself, but rather herself elsewhere. No! Not herself. A someone else. Oh, it began to overwhelm her again.

---

The test lay open before her, and the pages were full of words. They made sense, but... Oh no. This HAD happened before. A standardized test. She'd nearly forgotten. She'd written pages and pages of words, or, her subconscious had, and it wrote like she spoke and thought. "Very creative," the person who judged the writing of 6th graders had written, before giving it the lowest possible score and recommending she see a specialist in case she had a learning disability. She didn't. No surprise there. Run on sentences and sentence fragments are not hard for a reader to understand, but the school system, or the government, or somebody in charge of something, had decided that there were rules that needed to be followed in writing, and if you couldn't follow those rules, they had no use for you. She had 10 minutes left on this test. She went back to the beginning to read the question, and answer it, in a grammatically correct fashion, and without the metaphors of her very creative subconscious.