Project Devilgama

Seventeen

A battalion of pupils has invaded the grand lobby of the National Military History Museum. All of them were busy with their comrades with whom they had spent the first half of a semester. It was such a friendly healing. They were fresh inputs, hadn't known hatred, and getting to know each other was the only thing inside their minds.

AMX-13 – an illustrious tank – was put on a levitating slab in front of the museum. It had worn a fabric of history, only getting thicker the longer it stood there. An ancient machine of war, it flexed its past as the pinnacle of firepower. The bulky metals of its armor defied the rusty demise despite hundreds of years of existence.

Mhaz had been snuggling amidst the always wobbling crowd, under the shade of the warped wide canopy. He could've gotten lost, but he finally hit up with Maykal and a tall, fat boy from the neighbor class, Latvi.

A stoic officer exposing chest candies on his uniform walked in front of the spasmodic gathering of students, "Attention!" He shouted before the closed glass door, "In five minutes, the tour will begin. Each class must arrange by two-by-two. Keep it nice, and we'll have you inside in queue."

The door had opened on the big museum. The lines of students crept into the doorway like snakes unraveling their segmented coils. To Mhaz, that organization was somewhat useless; it seemed neat and perfect from the front, but the students dispersed just right as they breathed the air of the interior. Etalases and displays were placed inside the first room to visit, the contents spoke of pre-independence history. There were types of equipment; radios putting on random voice codes without anyone touching and military small gears hovering upon a superconducting platform.

A series of condensed spectrums of manuscripts greeted Mhaz, May, and Latvi in the next room. They were holographic copies floating above the glass display of the real one that refused to rot. From those tan and wilted papers, Mhaz was forced to look back on the aspirations, plans, and motivations of the pioneers who had built this nation's earliest state. All of the original texts were centuries old, a touch of a hand would be enough to turn any of them into powder.

The three were done sucking up the written passages into his brain and headed back to the corridor to move to another room.

A hand abruptly snatched the handle on Mhaz's backpack. "Hey, Mhaz," it was a soothing voice of a girl.

"Oh, Farad. What's good?" He said as his body tilted off balance.

"Tell me about Annov."

"It wasn't Annov. It's Dedonov."

"Whatever. Tell me."

He kept walking under the rain of nervousness. He felt his whole heart dilating inside, a natural sign he couldn't deny. He silenced himself, his mind puzzling up. But even after dozens of steps passed, he still couldn't construct words to utter. He still has contact with Dedonov despite being in a different school. And last Sunday, Mhaz stupidly introduced Farad to that boy. It was only now did he feel the ample amount of regret that killed his voice.

"Maybe, you can ask the person." Mhaz put it to the point.

"Hehe."

--
He had another bed jolt. Another dream. Even though he wished it to continue, he kept waking up at the peak. And when it vanished without a sign of farewell, he had that short feeling of desperation. Only a little and it will fade away quickly. He began realizing that he was fond of these dreams. And the dreams were like a time machine simulation; they kept replaying certain teenage memories. But those memories always had that girl in them. Faradis.

He was fallen asleep in a small pocket overlooking the outside - it was like a porch on the massive aircraft. It had been raining since he first shut his eye, and that brings him additional tranquility throughout the whole sleep. All the rain drizzles that crept on the convex glass barrier, the obscured picture of the sky. The cruising hums of this aircraft became music to his ears. Now he had awakened. He clumsily sat on the ledge of the mattress, his mind was still clouded.