The first weird thing about moving on with Teddy was that he liked to be in charge. Actually, he couldn’t stand not being in charge. From the very minute they walked out of jail, Teddy slid on some sunglasses and started trying to call the shots--first off, by yanking Ninten and Ana into an alley, which wasn’t too polite, and he was pretty rough about it too.
“Listen up. You’re gonna take me to Mount Itoi and show me where all these psychotic monsters have been hiding out. Got it?”
“I’m sorry?” Ana laughed in disbelief.
Teddy folded his arms over his chest. “You’d have to be blind to miss that cloud of doom hanging over the mountain. Most people can’t figure out what those… things are doing there--I’ve tried myself. But you two? You’re kid psychics, and apparently you can mess with people’s brains. You have to know something about what’s going on up there.”
“I… honestly don’t,” Ninten said. “We’ve just been lookin’ for melodies. You said you’d help us, didn’t ya?”
“Hey, this is a two-way agreement. Otherwise I’m out.”
It was Ana’s turn to fold her arms in defiance. “You didn’t say anything about that in the cell. You just said you’d come with us on our mission to fight the Weirdness.”
“Well, if you kids are gonna drag me into your little game of pretend, then I want proof,” Teddy said.
“Proof?” Ninten repeated. Proof of what? He’d already seen their PSI, right?
“All this ‘Magicannon’ shit, why should I believe you?”
Ninten didn’t feel too great about Teddy’s tone, or the constant rude demands, but he smiled anyway. Maybe Teddy just needed a little time to settle in. Yeah, that was it. Ana had trouble at the start, too--this was no big deal.
“It’s Magicant, actually,” Ninten said. “But… don’t you trust us?”
“Right now? Not as far as I can spit,” Teddy replied. “Now, a dangerous journey, that I can believe. Kids like you get neck-deep in trouble all the time. My problem’s with the weird fixation on some queen I never heard of.”
Oh, okay! That was easy. Ninten had actually been wondering about something he saw pretty early on, but the time never seemed right before…
“I can take you to Magicant,” he said.
“Wait, really?!” Ana asked.
“Yeah! Why not?”
Ana was staring at Ninten with real wide eyes. “Well, I don’t know! You sort of made it seem like Magicant was some abstract place, it just didn’t seem…”
Now that Ninten thought about it, that did kinda make sense. For all his talk about uniting his friends to gather the melodies, he hadn’t ever bothered to “prove” Magicant to them. Although, to be fair, they never asked.
Teddy, unsurprisingly, still didn’t look too sure. “How do I know this ain’t a cheap trick? I’m not gonna follow you out to the middle of nowhere and end up getting messed up by a Snake.”
Was that all Teddy was worried about? The guy had so much muscle, he could donate some to charity and still be able to squish Ninten like a bug afterwards!
“Teddy, if I can beat up a snake, so can you!” Ninten said.
“Not the animal,” Teddy groaned. “The thugs! I’m in a gang, kid. Other gangs don’t like us.”
Oh, that made a lot more sense.
“Well, I’ll tell ya what, Teddy. These Snake guys, they’re here in Valentine, right?”
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That's What Bein' A Friend Is About
Fanfiction[cover art courtesy of _moonrise_art on twitter] Lloyd's partway through growing up in the suburban town of Thanksgiving. He doesn't have friends. The other kids at Twinkle Elementary bully him, and he's perfectly content to devote all of his free t...
