rules are made to be broken -mollie-

Nat was chilling in the eilemaiden training arenas, where unsettled kids like her were explicitly banned from entering. Even settled kids needed special permission to use these facilities, and even then usually under the supervision of a teacher. However, Nat reasoned that if the teachers really didn't want her to come here, they wouldn't have made it the coolest and most interesting place on campus.

She was currently up on the starting platform of the Cuir arena, maybe thirty or so feet up. Her legs dangled over the side as she looked out over the arena. Maybe I'll settle as Cuir, she thought to herself. Maybe. It was so hard to choose. She went back and forth all the time.

As she was looking around, she happened to see someone else walking through the arena. She pulled her legs back up, thinking it must be a teacher. But no, when she looked closer she realized it was her sister of all clio. Well of course, if any student could get special permission to come to the eilemaiden arena alone, it was goody-goody Mollie. She must be on her way to the Earalas arena.

Nat hastily rummaged through her backpack and pulled out a little blue
rubber eraser. She watched as Mollie got closer and closer down below, and once she was close enough, she dropped the eraser on her head.

Mollie had gotten permission from Mr. Lilas Kris Mr. Lilas to practice wielding her eilemaiden in the Earalas training arena. She'd been spending extra time with him lately, because of Lilycove's Kids, and because of that she'd found herself wanting to excel even more at Earalas. She'd always tried hard enough to pull off an A, of course, but before this semester she hadn't had any real interest in Earalas, itself. This semester she found herself wanting to be at the top of her class, not just in theory, but in performance.

She decided to take a little detour through the Cuir zone instead of trying to weave around it, and that was where she found herself--far under the overhead obstacle course--when something fell out of the sky and smacked her on the head.

"Ow!" she cried, her hands shooting to the stop where she'd been hit. She looked up, and saw none other than Natalie Heather Sterling looking down at her, perched with her feet dangling over the edge of the platform.

Half of Mollie wanted to scream at her for dropping whatever it was she had dropped, and the other half wanted to scream at her for sitting so dangerously close to the edge. Stupid little sister being so stupid and crazy!

"Nat!" Oh she was SO ANGRY. "Get away from the edge!"

Bullseye! The eraser bounced right off of Mollie's big ol' head. Nice.

"What, this edge?" she yelled back down at Mollie. She could tell Mollie was pissed off down there. She turned over and hooked her feet through the top rungs of the ladder she had climbed up to get here so she wouldn't fall, and leaned over the edge waving her arms at Mollie. "This edge right here?? Is this the edge I should get away from?"

"Oh my gods, NATALIE!" Mollie screamed, actually very worried. Why did Nat do this to her all the time, why?? She didn't even know what to do. Yelling at Nat was sure to only make it worse--she loved antagonizing Mollie every chance she got--but she couldn't just let her stay up there. What if she really did fall?

"Get down here!" she yelled. Oh gods, was she going to have to go up there? Would that make things better or worse?

Nat pulled herself back onto the platform fully. "Or what?" she yelled back down, no longer even looking at her sister. She laid on her back and looked up at the sky. It was a nice day out, blue skies and fluffy clouds and all that. She didn't know why Mollie cared so much, it wasn't even windy up here.

She'll probably go get a teacher, Rio pointed out.

Ugh, he was right. And Nat was trying not to get caught doing anything for the rest of the semester. Goddammit. She had promised her dad, and while it wasn't that big a deal, she'd feel kinda bad if she wound up breaking her promise after just a couple weeks. She sighed and sat back up, edging over to the ladder. "Alright, alright, keep your panties on, I'm coming down," she yelled as she began to descend.

Mollie felt herself getting angrier as Nat disappeared from view, but a few moments later she caught sight of her feet as she started to descend. She was so irresponsible and blindly brave and it irked Mollie to no end. If she wanted to get into trouble, why couldn't she do it in a less dangerous way?

When Natalie finally go near the bottom, Mollie could breathe again. She smacked the back of Nat's head when she made it to ground level. "What the hell was that for?" she asked, holding up the eraser she'd picked up off the ground during Nat's descent. "You little brat."

Nat irritably rubbed the back of her head where Mollie smacked her. Maybe she shouldn't have bothered climbing down, after all. "Your head's so big, it just seemed like the perfect target from up there," she said. "What are you doing here, anyways? Since when do you even use your eilemaiden?"

Mollie had been settled for a few years, and yet Nat could count on one hand the number of times she'd seen her wield. Their parents did it all the time; their mom would often use it for practical things, while their dad would do cool tricks and stuff like fireworks to entertain them, at least until Mom saw and made him stop because it was "too dangerous" or whatever. Ugh, Mollie and Mom were exactly the same in that regard. Killjoys.

Mollie wanted to smack Nat again but refrained. "I'm here for school," she said irritably. "Obviously you're not--were you hoping to get suspended again?" She looked up into the sky. "Or were you hoping to get yourself killed? You'd probably break every bone in your body if you fell from that height." Or crush her spleen or her kidneys or lungs or something.

Nat rolled her eyes. "I wasn't gonna fall," she said. "And I wasn't gonna get suspended either, unless you were planning on telling on me. I was just sitting up there, not bothering anybody." Nat never understood it. Coming to the eilemaiden arenas, going out after dark, drinking, smoking pot, whatever. Who was any of it hurting? No one. So why did everyone care so goddamn much?

Well you were bothering Mollie, by dropping an eraser on her head, Rio pointed out.

Oh yeah. "Besides you," she added, to be fair.

"No one who falls thinks they're going to, Natalie," Mollie snapped. "There are no railings up there, you idiot. What if you'd lost your balance?"

Mollie pocketed the eraser. "Couldn't you have visited one of the other arenas if you wanted to sneak in here so badly?" she asked. Excluding the obvious Earalas one, Cuir was probably the most dangerous arena Redfern had. "Go, like, climb on the rocks, or something. Explore in Nadar."

"Clio die all the time just from slipping and falling on the ground from zero feet in the air. Guess we should all stop walking too, just to be safe." Hell, riding a balloon was probably more dangerous than climbing that platform, and yet clio did it every day without batting an eye.

She shrugged. "I felt like doing Cuir today," she said. "I was just at Nadar the other day. They only change the arenas once a month, so I didn't feel like going back there yet."

Mollie narrowed her eyes, getting sick of all the smart ass comments Nat was making. They didn't even deserve responses. "What makes you think you can just come in here whenever you want? There is a reason you have to have permission you know."

Nat thought she was so freaking clever, like she had everything figured out. It made Mollie's blood boil.

"Go back to campus, get into trouble over there."

"Yeah? And what reason is that?" Nat asked. "I'm not hurting anyone by being here. The rules at this school are a joke."

And the way they enforced the rules was a joke, too. Nat wasn't stupid, she knew that if she wasn't from a rich family, she would have been kicked out a long time ago. If the school was going to be so blatantly unfair and corrupt in how it treated its students based on how much money their parents made, then Nat was going to exploit the hell out of it. Who knew, maybe if she pissed them off enough, that actually stop the blatant favoritism. Doubtful, though.

"This whole place is a joke."

"You could hurt yourself," Mollie said, exasperated. "You're not invincible, whether you think you are or not." Sometimes talking to Nat was so frustrating. She was so hard headed and childish. Mollie sighed. She knew if she left Nat would probably scamper right back up onto the platform, or worse, try to follow her to the Earalas zone.

Walk with her? Olivier suggested. Mollie balked at that. She'd set aside this time for practice; she wanted to impress Kris with how well she'd been wielding lately.

"How about instead of trying to get ourselves killed, we like, go do something else?" she offered, trying to think of something to get Nat out of here. It would be easy to leave her alone, but Mollie didn't think she'd be able to focus on her eilemaiden with the thought of Nat trying to be a sky acrobat. "I'll buy you dinner?"

Nat was about to launch into another argument about how that was her choice, and you could get hurt doing anything at anytime, et cetera, when all of the sudden Mollie changed her tune out of nowhere and offered to buy Nat dinner. "Wait, you actually want to hang out with me?" she asked dubiously. It had seemed like ever since Mollie started school eight years ago, she'd never wanted to hang out together again. "I mean...okay."

Mollie had been expecting Nat to decline in some bratty way, and felt a little sigh of relief leave her when her sister instead agreed to go. She was still annoyed with Nat, but she'd skipped lunch to work on the history project she'd been mostly been doing alone anyway, so she was hungry. "Where to?" she asked. Nat responded and the two started walking there.

Mollie shifted her bag on her shoulders, trying to think of something to fill the silence. "So, I've been working on this project for history," she said conversationally. "And guess who is my partner?" She didn't give time for Nat to guess before she said with disgust, "James."

Nat was about to say she didn't know, since she didn't really know anyone in Mollie's class, when she answered her own question with,

Mollie Ollie wrote:"James."

"Oh. Gross," Nat said, scrunching up her nose. If there was one thing in the entire world that Mollie and Nat agreed on, it was that Jamey was a jerk. He always used to make fun of Nat when she was younger for looking like a boy, and even now, he was still a jerk to her every time he saw her. "You should just do it by yourself. I would rather do a whole project alone than work with him."

Actually, Nat would rather just not do the project at all and get an F, but she knew Mollie would never do that.

"You're telling me," Mollie said. "I have been mostly doing it alone. I just hate that he's going to get a good grade when he's basically done nothing. Group projects are stupid." In Mollie's case anyway, when you had a partner or a group you either had to suck it up and do most of the work or take a lesser grade than what you would have gotten if you'd worked on it alone. No one Mollie ever got paired with seemed to have the same drive that she did, so even when she had a partner that wanted to do their share of the work Mollie had to put in extra time to make sure their half was as well put together as hers was.

"What about you, done anything extra crazy lately? Please spare me the details from anything involving sky diving or wind surfing."

"They are stupid," Nat agreed. If it were her, she would just do nothing and let Jamey fail. His mom got pissed at him if he got bad grades.

When Mollie asked Nat if she'd done anything extra crazy, she thought about the conversation she'd had with Theo about tagging school buildings. Nat had decided that she wouldn't do it, but she also wasn't gonna rat Theo out if he still planned on it. And obviously she wasn't about to share any of this with Mollie.

"Oh you know, the usual," she said with a shrug. "Bank heists, doing drugs, joining gangs." Only two of those were jokes. "What about you? Do anything crazy lately? Like jaywalking, or getting a B+, or not returning a library book on time?"

Natalie Bo Batalie wrote:Oh you know, the usual. Bank heists, doing drugs, joining gangs. What about you? Do anything crazy lately? Like jaywalking, or getting a B+, or not returning a library book on time?

Mollie rolled her eyes at Natalie's response to her question, and then narrowed them as she scowled at the questions directed at her. "I'll have you know I have jaywalked on multiple occasions," she said, as if it was an accomplishment. It wasn't completely true, however. She didn't jaywalk on principle, and had only ever done it if it was absolutely necessary (like that time a few weeks ago she'd been caught out in a rainstorm and hadn't wanted to ruin her hair by crossing down the street). She did crack a smile, though. Nat could be funny, she supposed.

Finally they reached the restaurant Nat had suggested. Mollie hadn't come here in years--it was a beachy sort of place that served hot dogs with a million different toppings and bottomless fries. The real treasure of the place though, in Mollie's mind, were the delicious handmade milkshakes. They stood in line.

"You know, if you put half as much energy into your work as you did into that smart mouth of yours you'd be getting A's, too." She knew that comment would fall on dead ears--Nat just didn't care enough about her school work. "How are the piano lessons coming?" she asked, trying to bring the conversation around to something Nat would actually be interested in.

Maybe Kris has taught you about more things than just your eilemaiden, Olivier noted, noticing how Mollie was trying to give a little so she'd be able to better communicate with Nat.

Wow, Mollie was actually smiling at a joke that Nat had made. Mount Earalas must be freezing over right now.

Mollar Dollar wrote:"You know, if you put half as much energy into your work as you did into that smart mouth of yours you'd be getting A's, too."

"Yeah, what a waste of time that would be," Nat said in an agreeable tone, as if that was what Mollie had been suggesting.

Moller Baller wrote:"How are the piano lessons coming?"

Nat gave half a shrug. "I don't like how the instructor teaches," she said. She had started taking personalized lessons here, but the instructor was awful. All he cared about was the technical aspects of the piano, and thought his way was the only way to succeed. "He teaches nothing like Dad. Or even Jack." Her dad naturally had a different method of teaching since he didn't use sheet music and all that, but even learning to read music with Jack had at least been fun. "He even said Dad shouldn't have taught me how to play without having me learn to read sheet music first. I'm probably gonna quit soon."

Mollie didn't know enough about music to know whether there was a right or wrong way, but it did seem like a fundamental step to learn how to read sheet music. It made sense for their dad, of course, but... Oh well. There was nothing to be gained by trying to side with her teacher.

"That's too bad," Mollie told her. "I thought we'd finally get to hear you play in the concert hall." If you took lessons through school, eventually you got to play in the solo concerts at the end of each semester. Mollie couldn't understand how someone would put so much effort and time into something, but not want to showcase it. In contrast, Mollie entered as many designs as she could into fashion shows. She loved to share her work with others.

Mollie and Nat reached the front of the line, where Nat ordered a Dahlin Dog, which was the same thing as a Chicago Dog (whatever Chicago was), and some bottomless fries. Yum.

"I don't really want to play at the school concert hall," she said as the two went to find a table where their food would be brought out to. "I'd rather play at a bar or club, or like, a real music venue." The school concert hall so did not count as a real music venue. "Somewhere I can play my own stuff and not just read off a piece of paper."

Mollie ordered a plan hot dog with ketchup and, because the fries were large and bottomless, decided she would just swipe some of Nat's. She also ordered a gigantic strawberry milkshake (with two spoons).

Nat wrote:I don't really want to play at the school concert hall. I'd rather play at a bar or club, or like, a real music venue. Somewhere I can play my own stuff and not just read off a piece of paper.

"Do you write your own music?" Mollie asked, surprised. She'd heard Nat playing on the family piano at home but she'd never paid enough attention to know if it was original or not. Thinking about it, she guessed if there was no sheet music it would be hard to tell, anyway. "Color me impressed, Natalie Sterling."

Nat was about to make a moody comment about how she'd been writing music for like two years now, but realized it wouldn't really be fair. After all, it wasn't like Nat showed any interest in Mollie's hobbies, so why should Mollie show interest in hers? "Yep, been doing it for a little while now. I was pretty bad at it when I first started though," she said instead.

"What about you? You...uh, sew anything lately?" she asked. Since for once in her life Mollie was being nice, she figured she could do the same.