Wrangling teenage emotions is hard enough on good days, but what if on bad days they could manifest as giant flesh and blood monsters?
Pacific Rim meets Friday Night Lights as knee-jerk rebel Sage Sawyer is forced to join her high school "tourneytub...
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This class is so incredibly boring.
It's Tuesday morning and Gee's history teacher is droning on. And on. And on.
He's drawn an incredibly unnecessarily detailed picture of Krakatoa behind him on the board. Gee is more interested in how he accomplished this than the actual content of the history lesson.
"In 1883 the volcano erupted," the teacher starts adding frantic lines to the mountain on the board, "sending millions of tons of ash and smoke into the air. The explosion was so big, it sent plumes of debris all around the world. For years afterward, global temperatures plummeted due to all the dirt in the air blocking out the sun..."
Gee's mind cannot keep track of whatever it is he's going on about.
She looks at the clock. A mere fifteen minutes have ticked by since the beginning of class. Gee isn't sure how that's metaphysically possible. It feels like she's been sitting here for four thousand years. She sighs.
"...among the debris, something else was thrown up into the atmosphere. We still don't really know where it came from. Was it some ancient virus hidden deep below the surface of the Earth, just waiting to be flung into the atmosphere? Was it from somewhere deep in space, traveling on an asteroid which crashed here, possibly millennia ago? We may never know. All we know is, the Hippocraphlege Affliction was unleashed globally that day. And it has changed the course of our world ever since..." The teacher's voice is far too soothing, crashing against Genesis's ears like a lazy ocean.
Gee tries to shake her head, but keeping herself from falling completely asleep is proving a difficult task. She is determined to find herself a distraction. She pulls her phone out from within her overall's pockets, holding it just below her desk. Gee is confident she won't get caught. This teacher is so old he probably doesn't even know what a cell phone is.
Gee reads a new text. It's from Sage.
Nice moves @ practice yesterday.
Gee feels her cheeks already burning. She types a response out before she even has a chance to really think it through.
I'd rather b moving with u ;)
It's a joke, of course. Gee would never send it to Sage.
But then Gee's finger slips. Either that or her heart momentarily wrestled control away from her brain.
Oh no.
Oh no, oh no, oh no.
Gee's pupils dilate like some hunted animal. But it's already too late.
She sent the message and there's nothing she can do about it now.
And still her teacher carries on: "Hippocraphlege Affliction, or HA, as it has come to be known, had infected the entire population of Earth in a matter of months. And not long after that, humanity was forced to come to grips with exactly what this meant. Everyone instantly became capable of manifesting humors. Nightmares. Dreams. Hopes. Fears. These beasts vary in size depending on the intensity of our emotions, but they can appear in a cloud of dust at any time, if we feel too deeply, too quickly. Only one out of ten people are capable of controlling their manifestations. These thaumaturges, as we call them..." '
