Infinity Legends

Chapter 5: The Star Journal

As Luca took the last sip of his morning coffee, he flipped the leathery journal’s pages to find the notes from the previous night. Early morning practice had been shorter that day, allowing Luca to stop by the local coffee place and still make it to the classroom with enough antecedence to resume the Bluehorn studies interrupted by his nameless roommate. With another failure, there were always new lessons, and comparing different lessons from different failures was often the key to innovation and success.

Luca almost choked on his espresso as he came to the Bluehorn page of his notebook. He read it twice over, then a third time just for good measure, before searching the rest of the notebook to make sure he was on the right page.

Most of the information seemed to check out. Yes, he had taken and scratched most of those notes, and he particularly remembered the last line he had written: ‘Mines effective. Foliage used for flanking charge.’

However, just beneath those words, a whole new string of text was written in the same orange marker he had borrowed from his roomie. These new notes however, as Luca would have expected, were not in his handwriting, but in a much clearer and rounder calligraphy. Running his fingers over the words in orange as if to check their reality, Luca read the scriptures under his breath.

“Find underground antimatter mining drill. Gather access codes. Engage BH. Activate mining drill 7 to 10 seconds after engaging BH. Zig-zag through energy posts in the river. Plant explosive on outer river area about 5 meters prior to energy post. Detonate 1 to 3 seconds before BH is in range. Climb a tree.”

Luca frowned, mindlessly taking another sip of the already empty coffee cup. Logic dictated only one person, if not himself, could have written that, but even then it made no sense. Sure, the roommate was a bit weird, but why would he be poking around Luca’s private notations? More, why would he add to said notations? When Luca had returned to the dorm the previous night, the guy was already sound asleep and snoring, and by the time Luca got up to practice the man had already vanished and left his bed perfectly intact, as if he had never even been there. Would someone be as odd as to wake up before dawn and just to waste time poking through someone else’s journal?

And those questions weren’t even the main concern of Luca’s as he read the mini essay a second time. The one thing occupying his thoughts was the lack of sense on that text. Was it a prank? Maybe. But it still made some sense. There was an underground mine running under Silver Creek Mountain, and there was a river with energy poles and there were trees around said river. The events suggested just did not seem to follow any logical order. How would an underground drill help? And why would he detonate the explosives before having the Blue Horn in range? Not to mention how pointless climbing a tree seemed to be to the overall scheme of things.

But all those questions were about to be abruptly postponed.

“Hi, Luca!” Emma’s high-pitched voice squealed as she slid into the seat behind his for that morning’s criminal law lecture.

Luca sighed and rolled his eyes, already expecting to turn and see the blue-eyed blonde in a pink dress, or a pink tricot jacket or a pink blouse. When Luca first came to campus two years ago, his athlete reputation and friendship with Gabe had made him fairly popular with the ladies, and Emma had been the first one to book passage on that train. She was Luca’s first university hook up, and he had had nothing to complain about.

Apparently, however, she did.

One week after their casual night together, everyone from the football team to the chess club seemed to know certain private details of the event. Details only Luca and Emma should have been privy to. Details Luca knew he had not leaked, leaving a single other option.

He had not talked to the girl since then, and for two years she had not seemed to mind that. It was not like she did not have fools lining up for her as well. Just as Luca had gone from a sport-scholarship freshman to the captain of the swimming team, Emma had found herself to the leadership of the local sorority. It was only all this time later, when fate placed them on a same class, that she seemed to reignite the old spark of passion, and he was not falling in that trap again.

“What do you want, Emma?” he replied in a I-don’t-have-time-for-this-bullshit tone.

“Hm, grumpy much! Didn’t sleep well?” Emma leaned over his seat, her vanilla perfume flooding Luca’s nostrils and assaulting his lungs. “Maybe you’d sleep better if you had someone to do it with.”

Luca chuckled. The person sleeping beneath him and his snoring were exactly the problem, even if that was not at all what Emma meant.

“What’re you doing there?” Emma asked, peeking over his shoulder at the open notebook, which he immediately slammed shut.

He did not mind gaming. With a game as immersive and breathtaking as Fantasy Stars taking over the world, all sorts of people found themselves playing every day. The one thing he was slightly uncomfortable about was how seriously he took the RPG. While most people played casually just to have fun with friends and experience intergalactic excitement, Luca did not know a single other person who took notes of all their adventures and meticulously planned for the most efficient way to solo high-level creatures. He could see how some people would consider that a bit too much.

“Not much,” Luca grimaced, hoping Emma had not managed to read or comprehend his scribbles. “Just catching up on some classes I missed.”

“Hm, my attendance is pretty good this semester,” Emma ran a finger over Luca’s collarbone from behind him. “Maybe you could come over and…”

“Good morning class!” the professor’s rusty voice boomed across the classroom, interrupting Emma and pushing her back to her seat. Luca had never been more pleased to see Mr. Girardi’s mustache.

As the professor immediately began his monotonous speech and insufferable slide exposition, Luca slid the leather diary back into his backpack.

And he never saw Emma snatching it to herself right away.

***

Emma threw her head back in laughter, almost falling from the back of the bench she had perched herself up on during lunch break. Another two girls were sitting around her, with a fourth standing behind the group and reading the leathery diary from over Emma’s shoulder.

“Okay, what about this one?” Emma flipped the little yellow pages to a section title ‘The Maze’. “The maze: ‘Miner drones equipped with laser claws. Passive during entry, aggressive on the way out. Drawn by Void Crystals. Beware space pirates!’ Space pirates underline twice.”

Emma and the girls on either side of the bench broke into laughter once again. The one standing behind the bench, however, barely chuckled. Her lack of enthusiasm had not gone unnoticed.

Emma turned around to face the fourth girl.

“Not having fun, Sar?”

Sarah found herself slightly flustered as the other two sorority sisters turned to inquisitively stare at her as well.

“No, it’s just…” Sarah scratched the back of her neck beneath her curly brown hair. “Not sure I get what’s so funny.”

“What’s so funny is that we, I, just discovered the swimming team’s captain is a major dork!” Emma giggled, and a second later was joined by the girls on her either side.

“I know, I just mean…” Sarah shrugged. “I know a lot of guys who play that. Guys who aren’t dorks. Carly, didn’t your ex play this game?”

One of Emma’s oxygenated pseudo-clones nodded frantically, visibly swallowing dry, worried for her reputation.

“But he didn’t have, like, a space-diary, did he?” Emma asked waving the stolen notebook.

“No. Like, not that I knew…” Carly responded, eyes glimmering in hope.

“See?” Emma turned her focus back to Sarah. “Swimmer boy, full dork. Carly’s boo, only half dork, even though I heard he was, like, super good in bed!”

“He was!” Carly beamed.

“What about your boo, Sar?” Emma asked, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Charles? I don’t think he plays videogames, nah.”

“Sarah, come on!” Emma snapped her incredibly manicured fingers an inch away from Sarah’s nose. “That topic’s, like, very dead. We’re talking boyfriend bed skills now. Try and keep up, girl!”

“Oh, sorry,” Sarah shook her head, trying to think of how to properly approach her intimate life. Sorority rules stated you had to share every and anything with the sisters. Another rule stated no sister could ever share another sister’s intimate secrets. Apparently only the first rule was ever enforced. “Charles is okay. Yeah, I guess.”

“Ugh!” Emma rolled her eyes and jumped down from the bench, sliding Luca’s notebook into her purse. “You’ve got a serious case of boring-itis, Sar. Good thing it’s shopping Friday.”

“Well, actually…” Sarah started speaking, but stopped at Emma’s inpatient gaze falling upon her. Sarah gagged, wide-eyed, afraid she had been boring one step too far in a single day.

“Actually what, Sar?” Emma pressed.

“I think I’m just going home. Got some things to sort out…”

“You’re skipping shopping Friday?” Emma crooked an inquisitive eyebrow.

“Hey, maybe it’s better she stays,” the fourth girl, Cindy, spoke. “If she has boring-itis, can’t it be like… contagious?”

Both Sarah and Emma frowned and shook their heads, puzzled on whether Cindy was being serious about boring-itis being and actual disease. Carly, on the other hand, hurried to retrieve a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer from her purse and cleanse her hands of any potential boring-itis bacteria Sarah might have transmitted.

“Okay, I guess she does have a point,” Emma shook her head. “Whatever’s gotten into you, Sar, it’ll just, like, ruin our shopping mood. Now, girls, shall we?”

Emma turned to leave, extravagantly throwing her hair up behind her. As she began strolling away, she lodged her purse beneath her armpit, leaving it hanging by her back and giving Sarah the perfect opening to snatch Luca’s journal from right under Emma’s purchased nose.

Sarah smirked to herself, waiting just long enough for the three blondes to be out of sight before opening the notebook and flipping to the last filled page. A page titled Bluehorn. Sarah scratched her chin as she read the scribbles, getting extra contemplative as she reached the last series of annotations, seemingly written by someone whose handwriting was much better than Luca’s. A girl, maybe?

Pocketing the journal, Sarah set out to the sorority house. She had never personally met Luca Ford, but that was about to change.