Wake Up (Part 1)

Earth| Elitist Academy: Wednesday 2:48 pm

"WAKE UP!!!"

Zane jolted up from his classroom desk. His surroundings were hazy. Colours haphazardly merged into another and objects seemed to overextend themselves, if such a thing were even possible. Unfortunately, he could recognise the monstrous figure leaning directly against the front of his desk. That large and grotesque face could not belong to anyone else.

It was his teacher, Mrs. Pauper.

'Crap. I fell asleep in class again.' he thought wearily. 'I'm finished.'

His senses slowly began to return, and with it the full weight of his situation. Around him, his adolescent classmates were snickering.

"He fell asleep in class again! That's hilarious!" A girl whispered behind him.

"What excuses is he going to come up with this time?" The boy beside him chuckled. "Idiot."

Frustration seared through Zane's veins, fueled by the insults plowing through his ears. He had made a grave mistake. School was already difficult enough as it was, and he had just given them another thing to bully him about. He had given them yet another point of leverage. He had just given them another reason to give him pain.

'I need to salvage this situation.' Zane thought, his mind racing with both frustration and fear alike. He needed to appear strong. He needed to show the students that he was more than a target. He forced himself to fix his eyes on his teacher's hideous face. Ignore the rage visibly on her face, the veins bulging all over her neck, the fury emanating from the fiery eyes. Hold your own ground.

She opened her mouth and erupted.

"Zane Calvins!!! How long will it take me to drill into your thick skull to not fall asleep in class again!!!

The entire classroom went silent. Zane could feel her hot breath blazing down his face, his ears ringing the sheer volume of her voice. Zane felt as if his own consciousness was frozen from shock. He forced himself to crack through the mental ice, mustering the courage to look her in the eye and face her without fear.

"I… I apologise Mrs. Pauper," he said with the calmest voice he could manage. "I'll make sure I won't fall asleep in class again."

"Excuses!!!" Mrs. Pauper bellowed. "You tell me the same excuse every single time, yet you still fall asleep in class!"

Zane clenched his jaw subconsciously. He was already losing the argument. He continued to keep his eyes level with Mrs. Pauper, yet it was becoming more and more difficult. Her deathly stare seemed to penetrate his own soul, causing the fluids inside of his innards to swell violently. His own eyes began watering.

"I don't see any other students falling asleep in my class. What makes you so much more special than them!" She roared.

A tinge of anger pinched at Zane's side. He tried to suppress it, but all of his focus was being spent on maintaining his composure. So the anger grew.

"Do you think that you are better than everyone else here? While everyone else here works diligently, do you think you can be successful without any effort?"

Zane clenched his fist beneath his desk as he heard a few students chuckle quietly behind him. He was being humiliated. The students would gain yet another vantage point. He needed to stop it.

'But how?' he asked himself. 'No matter what I say, they'll use it against me!'

He strained his eyes to stay on Mrs. Pauper. He could feel the rampant frustration and fear slowly converting to anger inside his chest. Anger not aimed internally, but externally. Towards his classmates and the teacher.

"Look where you are Zane!" Mrs. Pauper bellowed, bringing her face closer to Zane's. "You are an example of what happens when you live life without any effort!"

The anger welled up Zane's throat. It tried to force itself out of his mouth, but he barely suppressed it. Instead, the rage fermented. She did not understand. She could not understand. He was sure that had put in more effort than anyone else in this room. He was born lower than anyone else, and he had spent a lifetime trying to match his peers. But it amounted to nothing.

"You have no friends."

He was brutally bullied by nearly everyone in the academy.

"You are barely passing your classes."

He did not have the time to work for a profession that would crush him.

"You don't play sports."

He was too short and scrawny to play school sports.

"You probably waste all of your living hours playing Quest and gain nothing."

He had sacrificed everything to climb up the Ranker Leaderboards in Quest, only to lose tragically and place in second.

"You are the exemplified reason why the elite make the decisions and the commoners don't."

He was born an orphan; born a commoner, taken from the slums as a newborn by an elitist woman.

"Wake up Zane."

'Wake up.' Fraus' words, the words from his dreamy flashback, returned to him to him once again

'What am I doing wrong!' He thought angrily. 'Why am I always doomed from the start?'

"Wake up," The voice of Fraus repeated.

'To what? To what!!!?'

"You are a failure." Mrs. Pauper finished, her words definitive and confident. "Give up."

Zane froze. The anger suddenly dissipated away. He opened her mouth to dispute her claim, but nothing came out. She was right. He was a failure. He always fell short of success every time. No matter how hard he tried, no matter what route or path he took, he failed. And with each failure, there was pain. Unbearable pain.

He took his gaze off the teacher's face and lowered his head towards the desk in front of him in defeat. A wry smile cracked her face. Victory was hers. He had lost. She began to pace backwards towards the hologram screen at the front of the classroom. Almost immediately, whispers and snickering reemerged from the silence. Zane could feel the stares of his classmates penetrating through his skull.

"Ha. What an idiot, stupid normie."

"I bet his faction hates him. Trash."

"He doesn't deserve to be an elite. Pathetic."

Zane could feel tears welling up in his eyes, but he managed to repress them. Calling himself the victim would not fix anything. He might be a failure, that did not mean he should sit there and do nothing about it. After all, when you are at the bottom, the only way to go is up.

'I will not give up.' Zane consoled himself, thinking of Mrs. Pauper's advice. 'I will succeed this time.'

With this decision, his clarity of mind returned, a halfhearted chuckle coming with it.

'I really shouldn't have played Quest that late last night.' he chided himself.

Zane sighed. Almost subconsciously, his mind returned back to the dream. But it was not a dream. It was a flashback. It was so realistic that it could have been a video replay of the event. It had been a year and a half since the completion of the Ranker Games, but Zane could still remember the day vividly. As his avatar Tide, he had climbed the tower quicker than any other player, but he had been stopped just inches away from the Staff of Destruction by Fraus. Zane shivered. It still hurt to think about it, even after so much time...

He cast the thought aside and tilted his head to the side, staring out of the classroom window. A long rectangular courtyard surrounded by angular crystal-white buildings filled his view. Excited elite students populated the central walkway that divided the green courtyard in half. Some chatted with each other as they walked to their next class, while others were gathered around various Netboards that holographically showed the school notices along with Government Media and Quest standings.

'I wonder if Arch's found any clues to where Quest's Key may be. I swear that guy never goes offline.' He wiggled his toes in anxiety. 'I need to get back on Quest asap...'

"Students." Mrs. Pauper's voice reverberated on the blank plaster white walls. Zane cocked his head back towards the teacher. "Today we will begin learning about the birth of our nation. I'm sure all of you are extremely informed on this subject, but nevertheless, it is imperative that we discuss this event as a class. Please take notes everyone." Mrs. Pauper then turned to Zane. "And you, you better take notes or else I will personally send you on your way back to the orphanage."

The class erupted in laughter. Zane's face turned bright red. Mrs. Pauper grinned.

'Screw her. I hope she drowns in a shallow puddle someday.'

The laughter soon subsided. Zane grabbed the pen on his desk and prepared to write on his digi-sheet as Mrs. Pauper began her explanation.

"Before we go into depth on this topic, I shall give you a quick overview. Back before our nation's birth, as you should know, the people were in utter chaos. In those times, there existed democracy. A good notion, in thinking, yes, and a good system of government when executed well." Mrs Pauper paused to allow the students to take the notes. "However, democracy was abused for power and desire in those days. The people as a whole worked for their own personal gain rather than for the gain of their nation. As a result, the government became entirely corrupt and slowly year by year, our nation's predecessor descended into eventual chaos."

Zane voraciously wrote down the notes from Mrs. Pauper's explanation. While he hated her as a person, he couldn't help but admit that she was a very good history teacher.

"At that time, four groups with good intentions rose from the ashes. While they disagreed on certain small topics, they all agreed on one thing. All of these groups advocated for a system of government that would end this self-interested thinking and place all attention on the wellbeing of the nation. To accomplish this, they proposed to introduce a class system, a system which we now see in our society today. This class system constituted of allowing an elite class to govern the nation alone, in which they would harbour the interests of both the people and the nation. By granting authority to a few, corruption would be stopped, and peace and stability would be able to be maintained for all."

Mrs. Pauper paused to allow the students to take notes. The entire classroom was enveloped in concentration, the sound of their scribbling filling up the silence. The students began to look up again to notify her that they were ready for her to speak again. She continued.

"While these groups were not necessarily friendly by any means, they decided to form a pact and overthrow the current government together. While their then seen-as extremist movement was met with initial criticism from the public, it slowly began to catch on. Many people with no trust in the government of their day began to side with the penned elitists. It was a chain effect. Soon, nearly all the nation, excluding the governing class, of course, supported the elitist movement. With this newly gained power, the elitists overthrew the existing government and replaced it with their own. On that day, democracy died and our nation was reborn for the better of our people."

'Democracy...'

Mrs. Pauper smiled triumphantly. "And from that day forward, the elitist government has been in power. By distributing equal authority to the four factions, which as you know, are Ordia, Prolifia, Libidia, and Lupia, true justice has been served to the people."

'Justice?' Zane barely suppressed the urge to laugh. 'What justice?'

She began to look proudly onto the students. "As you know, you students at Elitist Academy are the children of the people who began and today lead the elitist movement." She paused and scanned the classroom. "Elite, it is your responsibility to one day lead this nation and to lead our people." The students began to nod to themselves, showing pride in their inherited power.

'Leaders?' Zane nearly scoffed aloud. 'You think these arrogant brats can one day lead an entire country?'

Suddenly, the sound of the bell chimed through the speakers. Class was over.

"That's the bell students. We'll continue on this topic in our next lesson. Hope you enjoy the rest of your afternoon." She deliberately kept her gaze off Zane.

'I need to get out of here before either the students or Mrs. Pauper can pick on me.'

All the students stood up. "Thanks Mrs. Pauper," they said in unison. Zane remained silent.

Mrs. Pauper smiled warmly back. "You may leave now."

'GO!'