Shape of a Miracle EP 1 - The Pied Player

Smiling Faces

Her shoes echoed through the halls as she ran. Not that she could hear them particularly, but she could feel the vibrations produced from each and every pounding step. Sticking her head through every single classroom she ran by, she searched for the spirit, but to no avail. She was only ever met with a room full of students either sitting peacefully in their chairs as they ate lunch, or some of the messiest classrooms she had ever seen. Her heart sank. She was too late; the cat spirit must have already caused her fellow peer's trouble, creating havoc to some of these classrooms. But she had no time to apologise and help clean up, she needed to continue on her quest.

After looking through the open door to the school radio room and checking the creature wasn't hiding behind the soundproof glass of the recording room in it. Shoko reached the place she was dreading the most, her own classroom. But from the look of things, it remained as tidy as ever. She did, however, peer into the classroom a little more closely, just to confirm that the spirit was, indeed, not present.

And what luck, soaring above all the heads of her peers, was a little flying, magical cat spirit.

she belted through her classroom door, only stopping in fear of making a fool of herself. The spirit was flying at the side of a desk, trying to nudge the lid off of a packed lunch with its little stubs for hands. Shoko speedily walked to it, ready to catch it while it was distracted.

Then it threw the tinned lunch onto the wall. She jumped for the creature, but it had already zipped away from her grasp as she rammed her hands onto the table it was sitting on mere moments prior. Shoko gasped. All around her sat the group of popular girls from before. She realised that at best it looked to them as if she had randomly run up to them and slammed her hands on the table, or at worst it looked as if she was the one that threw the lunch in the first place. She clasped the sides of her skirt and braced for all sorts of confused and judgemental stares.

But, instead, she was met with four smiles. She was surprised. Grateful for their compassion she picked up the spilt lunch and returned it to them. She, however, was snapped back into the reality of her situation when on the other side of the classroom the spirit was trying to open a sandwich.

Before it was even within her grasp it flew away, sandwich in hand, out of reach in the middle of the classroom. Her head spun round the classroom. Everyone was still sitting on their desks, happily eating their meals. Even the popular girls. Could none of them see this?

She halted. She was in complete disbelief. One of the girls was opening their tin, ready to eat their lunch. The very lunch that had been thrown and spilt onto the ground. But as she was ready to run up to them and tell them, the creature breezed right passed her and under a line-up of desks. On her knees she shot for it, crawling through the aisle of desks, just barely missing the creature.

In her periphery Shoko then saw the girl picking up her contaminated noodles slowly raising it to her lips. "W-" Shoko winced, and immediately scrambled out from under the desks. The clearly dirty noodles were mere millimetres away from the girl's now open mouth. Then the girl bit into the air and dropped the noodles back into its tin.

Shoko stopped and watched the girl repeatedly happily pick her noodles back up, hold the food near her mouth and bite into the air. The rest of the girls were doing the exact same, charading like normal schoolgirls eating lunch yet leaving every part of the meal untouched. She looked at the rest of the class, each one of them silently sitting, pretending to eat their food, all slowly swaying. Standing still, Shoko noticed a clear buzz below her feet, emanating from the floorboards, thumping repeatedly like a drum, slowly getting more and more intense. Now that she was thinking about it, she had felt that vibration the second she stepped back into her school.

As she slowly rummaged her bag for her hearing aid, she watched as movement from the students matched perfectly to the rhythm of the vibration. Holding her hearing aid, she fiddled with its volume level, ready to put it into her ear to possibly hear whatever could be the cause of this.

But she was stopped. The spirit placed its tiny paws on top of her hearing aid. Its ears narrowed as it looked up at her with serious eyes. Then its whole body grew stiff, and it whipped to the closet at the back of the class. It peered back over to her and furiously gestured to her to follow it.

She looked down at her hands, one holding a ring, another a hearing aid. Below her feet the floorboards buzzed so intensely she was afraid they would break. She swallowed and placed the aid back in her bag. This was her responsibility, she had to see it through. So, she entered the closet with the creature and closed the door.

The door to the classroom flew open and barrelling in, came a boy who looked like he had jumped into a pool of multicoloured paint. Leaping right onto the teacher's desk, he ripped apart all the textbooks on it and flung them into the air, covering the room in a snowstorm of paper. Shoko stood there, mouth ajar, completely fixated at the ridiculous sight she saw through the blinds on the closet door's window. The boy animatedly waved his hands to the rest of the class, who all, in perfect unison, waved back. Without warning, they all sprung out from their seats and skipped closer over to him. Dancing around the desk he stood on as he gleefully laughed. He started dancing too, and even jumped onto one of the ceiling lights, swinging around. She didn't know how he managed to bounce around with those clunky, colourful accessories he had on (such as his backpack, boots, and not to mention the wires that jutted out of them all).

After a few minutes of fun and games, he abruptly dropped to the ground. The familiar sly smile he had planted on his face dropped down to his scarf as he rolled his eyes and turned back to the chalkboard behind him.

Shoko was so distracted from his...everything, that she almost forgot to listen in on him to find out what he was talking about. However, no matter how much she pressed her good ear against the glass she couldn't decipher a single word. When she gave up and turned to watch him, he was quickly jotting down something on the chalkboard. He turned to the rest of the class to show his work.

Three crudely drawn circles.

But then she did a double take. Drawn on the biggest circle was what looked like a paw print. The very same one that was on the ring she found. Perhaps the ring belonged to him, and he was simply looking for it. Maybe, If she were to return it to him, all this confusion would end. She looked to the spirit, who now rested on her shoulder, giving the colourfully dressed boy a glare so bold that Shoko was scared it would break the glass of the door's window, exposing them both. Perhaps not.

The spirit's eyes flashed to Shoko, it noticed it had got her attention, and swirled its way to the back of the closet, rummaging through the shelves. From the shadows the spirit returned, barely holding onto a block of sticky notes. He threw the thing onto her hands and whizzed away to grab a pen. Sitting on the sticky notes, on the palm of her hand, the spirit bit the cap off the pen and began to wright on it.

"Name's Plagg."