Lovely... (a Nico Di Angelo fanfic)

Lunch

The first time I saw him, it had been in May. I had been eating lunch out in to courtyard, sitting alone, like always. He had been leaning against the trunk of a tree, partially hidden by the shadow it cast. The kid had seemingly appeared from nowhere; I was sure he hadn't been there a second ago. My sandwich momentarily forgotten, I stood up and started to walk towards the oak. 

On sight, I knew him as what I overheard other people calling him. 'The Creepy New Kid' or something like that. He was sitting in the shade, twirling around a black pen...a very fuzzy black pen. I squinted, and the pen morphed into a dagger. Gasping, I staggered away from him; it wasn't that the dagger shocked me, it was the fact that what had looked like a pen was actually a knife. As I tried to get away without him noticing me, he saw me. Well, so much for a quiet getaway. As the kid stood up, there were some things that struck me as odd. One, he was wearing a skull ring, which the school's dress code strictly prohibited. Two, that dagger was made of a strange material, one that I couldn't identify. It looked like iron, but the color was too dark. Three, he wasn't making some snarky comment about my clothes, or the sandwich in my hand. He snapped and a wave of power cocooned me. I could feel it, but it didn't seem to touch or affect me. 

"This is a pen," he declared.

I stared at him. That thing he was clutching was definitely not a pen, "Uhuh, and I can fly."

He blinked, and then smiled. It was a pretty creepy sight, "Right, just messing with you. Can you still understand me?" 

Now it was my turn to blink. I could understand him, but if I thought too hard, all that I could hear was a bunch of gibberish. This was getting really strange, "Yes?" I questioned. "I can understand you?"

He frowned slightly, and gestured for me to come with him, "Get your stuff. I have something to show you."

I started. He couldn't have possibly wanted me to come with him, could he? After all, there was still a good twenty minutes of lunch left, and I didn't even know the guy's name. Still, it had been a long time since anybody had shown any interest in the field of actually talking to me and not at me. Needless to say, it was a welcome change. But there was still some business to take care of. I crossed my arms and said defiantly,"What could you possibly want to show me? And why should I trust you? You're new around here, right? Oh, and what's your name?"

He stared at me for a while and then finally, "Uhh, my name's Nico, you can trust me because I'm going to show you a place in which there are people just like us, and no monsters can kill you."

I couldn't comprehend the last part. Sure, I would love to go to a place in which I belonged, but what about school? Who would be there to rub every perfect test score into my nemesis's face? What would happen to my grades? What about my Science Fair project? What about all of those teams that depended on me to get them to the next round of questions? What about the art show? The Spring concert? Prom? Not that I had a date, but I had to go, since I was a Student Council member. And what did he mean by 'No monsters can kill you'? Still, my curiosity won. I nodded and went to get my books and lunch bag. Now that I think about it, that was a pretty bad idea, following Nico.