Rising Shards

Kalei had been trying to hide her internal meltdown as Nikki clicked away at the club room’s sole computer. Somehow, she had ended up working with Nikki on music for the club’s commercial. Kalei kept expecting her hands to feel sweaty, causing her to check too much if her hands were sweating. She hadn’t been able to say anything to Nikki once they split from the rest of the group. Latte was there for a few minutes, which weirdly kind of helped the tension, but then she finished another pot of coffee and once that was on her thermos, she was out of the room quickly. Kalei was growing more anxious that she was being weird to Nikki with her extended awkward silence.

“I’m torn on this,” Nikki said.

“O-oh, yeah?” Kalei asked. “How come?”

“Like, this club’s about us being lazy, right?” Nikki said. “But this is doing music, and that’s like the only thing I like doing. So I’m split between just finding some royalty free stuff and plopping that over whatever footage we end up with, or actually putting an effort in on this.”

“O-oh,” Kalei said.

C’mon, we can do better than that! Say something!

“I…like music.” Kalei said. She pictured her mental voice slapping her forehead in shame and disappointment. “I mean! Maybe for this we can try a little? Since we’re doing the music?”

“Yeah, that’s where I’m leaning,” Nikki said.

She clicked a bit on the computer. That was a decent save, but we seriously can and should do better.

“The music app on here isn’t great,” Nikki said. “But this is running on the Door OS and not Cheese.”

Kalei panicked. She had Door OS on her computer at home. Cheese OS was always in fancier computers, and she had generally made fun of it, her and her gaming friends were loyal to Door OS and the eGame and goofed on Cheese OS and the ODGC (Odnegel Game Console). She wasn’t used to someone actually preferring Cheese OS. Even more disconcerting was someone who was giving her such strange feelings like Nikki.

“Is Lightning better for music?” Kalei asked. “I have Door for gaming.”

“Oh yeah, Door is basically pointless for music.” Nikki said, brushing her orange hair with one hand. “But then Lightning is useless for games unless you just want to play like Raina Starlight’s Farm Adventure or whatever.”

Kalei snorted. “That’s actually Zeta’s favorite game.”

“Oh, nice,” Nikki said and laughed a bit.

OK, you just made her laugh. That’s good, right?

Nikki got to work downloading a bunch of music programs from some really sketchy looking sites, which Kalei found more cool than anything.

“Alright, it’ll take a sec for this all to install,” Nikki said, leaning back in her chair.

“Nice,” Kalei said.

Another awkward pause followed. Kalei strained to think of something interesting to say.

“Hey, remember how I asked if you could teach me beam chasers?” Nikki asked.

“Yeah, yes,” Kalei said. I’ve been thinking about it every night. She had to try really hard to not say her thought out loud. “Yep.”

“Cool, I kinda forgot until just now so at least you remembered,” Nikki said. “So if you teach me beam chasers, I’ll teach you how to make music. That sound like a good deal?”

A sudden blast of emotions hit her. Nikki sounded like she was kind of joking with the first part, but her forgetting gave the impression it wasn’t that big a deal to her. When it definitely was a big deal to Kalei. But on the other hand, she just offered to teach her music and also still wanted to learn beam chasers.

“Unless you know to make music already,” Nikki said. “Then I dunno, I’ll give you like something fair.”

“I actually don’t know how to make anything in music,” Kalei said. “I like to listen, but I don’t really know about the…making…it…”

She trailed off and tried not to wince, but Nikki wasn’t looking her way. Why is this girl making me react like this?

“Yeah, cool,” Nikki said. “That motivates me to actually try on this commercial thing more. We can start right now then, the main program we’ll use just finished installing.”

Kalei tried not to squirm in her seat, but she couldn’t let Nikki see her discomfort.

“Consider this your first lesson,” Nikki said, gesturing to the music program’s start screen. “I guess I can teach you like physical instruments eventually, but I dunno where we’d record them in good enough quality to use here. So this program is OK. You can pick your instrument and the layout’s pretty good for placing notes.”

“Alright,” Kalei said. “Always good to have a good layout.”

Luckily Nikki didn’t react badly for how dumb that line felt to Kalei. Even her comebacks felt weaker around Nikki. Instead, she scooted her rolling chair over and gestured for Kalei to take over.

“So…what should I do?” Kalei asked.

“For this lesson, just place some notes in and see how they sound,” Nikki said.

Kalei clicked around on the program. It was weirdly really complicated, and she needed Nikki’s help to see even how to grab notes and place them on the bar at the bottom of the screen. Eventually though she had a full line of notes that visually looked like it would sound good.

“Now hit that green smiley guy button,” Nikki said, pointing at the top of the screen. “That’s the preview thing.”

As soon as Kalei clicked it, she wanted to plug her ears. The notes all sounded so dumb and out of sync. It was intensely embarrassing even for a seven second snippet.

“Oh my god that sounds so terrible,” Kalei said. “I suck at this.”

“Nah, that’s actually pretty good!” Nikki said.

“Wait, what?” Kalei asked. “You’re joking.”

“Nah, for a first time that’s pretty good,” Nikki said. “You’re a natural, dude.”

Kalei didn’t know what to say to that. She had something to say to everybody when they said something. So why not Nikki?

“Alright, but let me take over though, you just gave me an idea.” Nikki said.

“Sure,” Kalei said.

Kalei scooted her chair back so Nikki could take over. She watched as Nikki started putting notes over the ones Kalei laid out, slightly reorganizing while still using the base Kalei had put in. Turning her messy jumble of notes into something with form and purpose.

Kalei couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t have good jokes around Nikki, she got quieter when she was always a chatterbox, she felt almost afraid to move. What was it about this girl that made her feel so defanged?