Boiling Isles RPG

Chapter 4

Luz’s POV

The rest of the day carried on pretty much the same as the morning had. Luz didn’t know why she even entertained the idea that this school would be any different. It was as though jerks were innately drawn to her, like they could smell the fact that she wouldn’t stand up for herself.

The last time she’d tried that had been years ago when she’d finally snapped and pushed the person who had been picking on her for months. The school’s stupid no tolerance policy had landed her with a suspension and the principal had required that their parents come to pick them up to discuss what had happened. That wasn’t a problem for the other girl’s stay at home mom who Luz could hear screaming about “Getting that brat deported!” from the other room; but it had taken Luz’s mom until two hours after school had ended just to get to her phone. She’d been assisting with a surgery and of course didn’t have her phone on her. It was dark by the time they got home and even though Camilia believed her when Luz said that she’d only been defending herself, the other girl and her mom had barely let her get two words in and the principal hadn’t cared enough to tell them to stop screaming.

Later that night, long after Luz was supposed to be asleep, she heard sniffling coming from her mother’s room. That was the first time she’d ever heard her mother cry and Luz was determined to make sure that it was the last, so she kept her head down, kept her grades up, and never said anything about what a mess her life was. Her mother had enough to worry about.

That’s why she kept her mouth shut when Boscha dumped her coffee down the back of her neck, and when she slid her lunch onto the floor, and when she tripped her in the hallway and stepped on her papers as she tried to pick them up. At least by the end of the day her hoodie had dried out, right in time for her to go back into the rain so she could bike to work.

Luz gazed out into the pouring rain on the other side of the glass door. The rest of the school had already loaded up onto the buses and Luz had done her best to avoid the crowd. It was a twenty minute bike ride to Eda’s shop, she just had to actually step out into the rain long enough to get there.

“Waiting for someone to pick you up?” A voice piped up from behind her. Luz glanced back and saw a girl with green hair setting up in one of the comfier chairs meant for waiting parents, the girl pulled out a textbook and looked like she was about to start homework even though they barely had any today. She recognised the girl from earlier in the day, she’d looked at Luz a little funny in precalculus this morning and, more prevalently she had also been following Boscha around all day, only rolling her eyes whenever the red head did anything.

So why was she talking to Luz?

“No,” Luz said, trying not to let her uneasiness show. “Just building up my nerves” she nodded towards the storm outside. “What about you?”

The girl shrugged, not really looking at Luz. “My siblings are going to pick me up in about an hour.”

Luz nodded, choosing not to continue the awkward conversation, she started pushing against the door. There was sound from behind her and she turned to see the green haired girl looking like she wanted to say something. “Yeah?”

She opened her mouth to say something and then seemed to think better of it, just shaking her head and turning back to her work.

“Okay then.” Luz, mumbled before bracing herself and heading out into the rain.

It took Luz ten minutes to get downtown where The Owl House was set up. She locked her bike to its usual pipe in the alley before trudging through the front door to the vacant pawn shop.

“Eda?” Luz called out upon seeing the empty main floor.

“You’re five hours late!” Luz smiled as the older woman stumbled out from behind the ‘staff only’ door, her arms full of junk with King rushing out from between her legs to jump into Luz’s arms. “Also you’re soaking wet.”

“Oh really? I hadn’t noticed.” Luz smirked as she scratched King behind his pointy white ears, the dog… cat… whatever he was didn’t seem to mind the water. “Also I told you I started school today.”

“Ah school shmool, I never finished school and look at me!” Eda stated pointing a thumb to herself as a dusty, glass Christmas ornament rolled off of the counter and shattered against the floor. “Now go upstairs and dry off, I don’t need you getting all my stuff wet.”

Luz smiled as the owl lady, as Eda liked to call herself, tossed her a change of clothes from a rack behind her and all but shoved her through into the employee only door. Though Eda had the rest of the building registered as storage space, it was pretty clear that she had converted the place into her home. By this point Luz knew the layout of the house pretty well, she placed her backpack by the seat at the kitchen table where she usually worked and went up the stairs to the bathroom where she finally hung her sopping wet clothes over the shower curtain, and changed into the ones Eda had thrown at her.

“How ya feeling?” Eda asked, hearing the door open as Luz stepped back into the main floor.

“Professional.” Luz replied with a laugh as she went over to Eda while sporting the Hello Kitty pajama pants and 80s band t-shirt that read ‘BAD GIRL COVEN. “And a lot better, thank you.”

“Yeah, can you believe I got those for two bucks each?” Eda cackled as she grabbed an old video camera that appeared to be new to the collection and shoved it into Luz’s arms, “I don’t even know what a coven is but I want to be a part of the bad girl one!”

Luz laughed along with her employer as she started turning the camera over in her hands, “So do you want me to take a look at this?”

“Yeah, a guy dropped it off for ten bucks, said it wasn’t working. Usually I have a consultant I can go to to see if it’s worth the time or effort to fix, but for some reason they decided to go to school!”

Luz gave the camera a quick once over, it was a mini vhs recorder that still appeared to be in decent condition, maybe a little water damaged. “I’ll do some research on this, then just go through my normal routine about fixing it.” Eda shot her a thumbs up which Luz enthusiastically reciprocated before heading back through the employee only door and plopping herself down at her usual seat at the kitchen table. There were a few other works in progress scattered in boxes around the floor, a few old game consoles that were damaged and waiting for parts to show up in the mail or other pieces of various technology that Luz had said she could take a look at and would probably be able to sell for a prophet.

After sticking her headphones on, Luz started up a video on her computer about game design because they weren’t learning anything in class yet that she would need extra time going over. Then she went to work, researching the type of camera and the brand, the usual resale value and so on, she found the kinds of batteries it used in the back of Eda’s battery drawer and managed to turn it on, though judging by the fact the fact that the screen was still dark despite the red light being on, she’d have to guess that she was correct about the internal damage.

She spent the next three hours doing research on the inner workings of this brand of camera and taking it apart and looking at what was inside. There was definitely a bit of water damage but nothing too serious, a few frayed wires that wouldn’t be hard to replace. Luz could probably have it fixed up by the next afternoon. She also made a point to mention to Eda that it probably wasn’t worth the hours she was putting into it monetary wise, not that Eda cared, the woman could sell hair gel to a bald man at a fifty dollar upcharge. And actually has.

The store closed at seven as per usual and Luz rode her bike back home. Thankfully by that time the storm had slowed to a drizzle so she didn’t get hopelessly wet on her way back to the house.

She grabbed the mail on her way in, throwing out the junk then placing the coupons in one pile on the kitchen table and the bills on the other. Luz sighed at the latter pile that was slowly growing just like it did every week with letters from the usual debt collectors as well as from the electric and water companies. Her paycheck always came at the end of the week, this’ll be the last one with the hours for working full time, hopefully they’d still be able to stay on top of everything with her only working part time.

Choosing to shove those thoughts to the back of her head, Luz opened the fridge to look for something to cook for dinner. She knew that they’d been running out of general foodstuffs, the empanadas from the other day had taken up a lot of the spare ingredients and there were still some left over but Luz tried to make it a point for there to be some options in the house. She grabbed a box of spaghetti and the rest of a bag of frozen meatballs and thankfully had them cooked and in the fridge in a timely manner.

After cleaning herself up, Luz booted up her laptop and immediately felt a sense of relief wash over her as she signed into the already active voice chat on discord.

“Hey guys!” Her voice sounded brighter than it had all day. “What’s going on?”