The Bad Boys' Soft Boys' Lonely Hearts Club - The Full Package

The Maze of Hungry Divergence ~ Part 1

It is at this moment that the sound of a horn makes the air tremble in G#. Or maybe it is an Ab? I should've paid more attention in music class. Then again, I would've been swept by some damn glee club if I paid a modicum of respect to anything above a Dorian scale. I would join a damn Model U.N club before that.

The sound of the horn is followed by the sing-song bell of a grandfather clock in the corner — the only remaining furniture in the room, besides the low chair. This, however, doesn't last long, as the pigmen carry the clock outside as it chimed its sad tune for the last time. But I catch a glimpse of the time as it passes by and...

12:00 O'clock? No, that can't be right. Class hadn't even started when we departed. And it's been like an hour at most of walking and knowing useless backstories of random gingers. I take out my flip phone—of course, flipping it like a greaser with a switchblade in a dark alley—and I can confirm that, indeed, it is 12:00 O'clock...A.M.

As in, the middle of the fucking night.

I stand up from the group hug hippy thing we're doing and run outside. It's hard to see through the thick canopy of trees and bushes that make a fake ceiling in the forest, but sure enough, there's a moon-shaped moon in the sky. A full one, too.

"What the shit," is all I can whisper. I head back inside, half turning between the group and the door, carefully thinking whether I'm having a stroke—or even worse, an embolism, the bad boy of strokes—but I decide to take my chances. "Babe, can you tell me what time it is?"

Hayden looks at me puzzled and worried, like a man without an embolism would see a man with an embolism, and takes out his smartphone. I will go out on a limb and say that I'm not having a stroke, only a mild case of aphasia, at best, because Hayden's face tells me that I'm not seeing things.

"It's...midnight?" says Hayden with puzzlement. "Wait, no. This can't be right."

Brayden takes out his phone and emits a loud gasping sound. "holy shit, it's 21:00 o'clock. i thought days only had twelve hours and shit."

"They don't," says Hayden, peering at Brayden's phone. "It says 12:00."

"ah, that must be that thinky-numbering-pain thingy i have. like, dyslexia, but with numbers."

"That would be dyscalculia, brother."

"and i also have normal dyslexia. and color dyslexia."

"That's called color-blindness," I say.

"i only do paint-by-numbers, so paint dyslexia it is."

You know what? This is like trying to teach a monkey how to program on C++. You would be lucky if he managed to program a calculator.

(Note: The author, yet again, has no idea about what any of that means. Again, he does not care to research it, and any attempt in the comments to teach him would result in mockery.)

Huh...weird. There's that author thing again. This is the second time such a note has happened. At first I thought it was my mind trying to rationalize things in a book format, as every bad boy does. But, I know how to C++. I'm gonna be a customer service representative one day, I have to program mediocre scripts to automate things.

Let's put a pin in that and deal with it later. First, the thing about being midnight. I want to ask Okayden about it, but we are interrupted by Trevor the Man-man walking in with the LB in tow.

"I'm sorry for the interruption, Master Okayden, but the horn of summoning has been blown."

"i've been blown, too," whispers Brayden, snickering to himself. "by a lady. with the lips and the whatnot."