A Paw Behind You

Something Stinks Fish... Somehow

So hot...

By now, it was mid-summer, and the weather toasted the whole room even with the air-conditioner blowing full-power. It was a wonder how everyone in the room still kept their shirts on. And... there was a weird smell coming from the back of the room. (It was probably the literal fishy classmates behind...)

Not pleasant to the least.

Anyhow, I might've shed a tear from the sight of the hallway, as math class was let off as per usual, and everyone was now moving onto whatever we were suppose to move on for the Monday.

"Ah!"

Turning a sharp right,  I was not expecting to bump straight into a familiar german shepherd, where their shorter stature nearly made me flip and roll over them as we both fell (embarrassingly) onto the cold-surfaced floor.

"Zain!" I got up in a haste, and noticing the scattered books and pencils rolling around the area, my teeth gritted in guilt, "Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry!"

"I-It's okay..." he got up quickly, patting away dust and dirt from his baggy dull-blue jeans, before beginning to pick up his stuff back, followed by me in helping anyway (FYI, I'm not a horrible friend. Of course I'll help him, for goodness sake... Okay, maybe I am horrible in other moments, but of course not then!).

Blatantly ignoring the snickers and whispers going left and right, we managed to pick things up and stuff them back into the leather sling bag Zain had on. "T-thanks..."

"Where are you going now?" I rechecked the contents of my rope bag as I asked.

"O-oh, it's um... I think I have Chemistry next...?"

"Hm... that should be close to the other lab... Let's go together!"

"Oh, a-a-a-actually, I need to take some stuff!" His sudden, completely unexpected loudness was drowned away with similar haste as he rubbed his paw pads and lowered his floppy ears in a depressing motion, "I-If it's o-o-okay..."

"Oh it's O..." he had already ran off before I could even finish my words'. Weird...

But anyway, being the good friend I was, I just brushed it off as something he was in a huge hurry to do. And... I had other more obvious things to notice about.

There was a sudden gathering of crowds formed right in the middle of the Eastern Block's ground floor hallways. With no choice or methods to circumvent this untimely congestion, I had no choice but to dive straight into the pit of danger (due to the majority of the students here being rich gossip machines, I have already landed myself in a few irritating pinches with these snakes...*grumble grumble grumble*)

Anyway, I couldn't help but notice the one being the source of it all.

"...I will begin an overhaul of the systems in place to benefit everyone in equal terms."

Near the garden-overlooking windows, a box-standing, green-patched-brown-furred wolf could be seen... announcing some stuff that I was, in no way, finding interesting at all. All he said was 'better this' and 'better that', and probably a bunch of other 'change here' and 'change that'. (Boooooooring...)

But what intrigued me, were the soft whispering and tea-spilling gossips thrown around as I quietly shuffled shoulders near them...

"You heard? That Zarath wolf's offering me a seat in that team of 'is." a suit-wearing red squirrel proclaimed proudly to another figure beside him, while his small hands adjusted the cufflinks he had.

"Poppycock, a fellow bird told me another agreement had been formed just a few minutes ago with the Germant House," a colorfully feathered parrot answered with an overly-privileged tone, "Just to let you know, of course."