Last time, cannibalism. Now, aftermath.
1:16 A.M.
GROUNDED
Jessica is grounded.
17
11:59 P.M.
REVELATIONS I
OK, I skipped the previous chapter for the sake of the joke because it’s very short and not much happened aside from Jessica being grounded, but there are actually some points worth noting.
The scene itself is not bad. Jessica’s parents are more concerned for her than angry and just want to know what happened and if Jonathan did anything. They do believe her about the fall once her mother notices every bruise on Jessica is marked with grass, indicating they indeed were received from an impact with the ground. They still warn her away from Jonathan and are suspicious about the timeline of the events.
“Were you really at the museum all day? Or with him?”
“I was at the museum. He wasn’t there.”
He nodded. “Doing a whole day’s worth of homework in the first week of
school? Can we see this homework?”
She swallowed. There was nothing to show them. She’d taken a few notes but
had solemnly promised Rex never to show them to anyone. When had she started
lying to her parents? When the world had stopped making sense, maybe.”
And that’s what happens when you lie for no real reason. She could have told her parents about that group of kids she met, Rex, Dess and Melissa, and then they could have confirmed she was with them relatively easily.
Jessica bullshits her way through it by claiming to do research and recalling various facts about spear forging Rex has told her.
I would also note that tomorrow (well, technically today, given the time) would be a good time for Jessica to tell everything to her parents at midnight. She should be able to prove the existence of the secret hour by moving stuff around her parents, fetching some objects around the house, etc. during midnight. Unlike other Midnighters, who want to preserve the secret hour for themselves, Jessica really doesn’t have much reason to lie about it, and now she has some incentive to reveal the truth to explain what happened. Of course, I don’t expect that to happen.
Now, seventeenth chapter for real.
Dess crafts a weapon out of a new microphone shaft by crafting thirty nine symbols into it and giving it a name of thirty nine letters composed of three words. I must say, I like the choice of Madness Talents made by those players. They are reasonably original while still giving each of them a definite role in the party.
“Her soldering iron still smoldered in one corner, a white sliver of smoke
winding up to the ceiling from its tip. As the candlelight in her room faded to
midnight blue around her, Dess watched the smoke freeze into place, its
snakelike undulations suddenly arrested. In the blue light it glowed against the
black walls, as delicate and luminescent as a strand of spiderweb caught by
sunlight.
Dess reached out one finger to touch it. A finger-width segment of the smoke
detached itself and traveled upward to the ceiling.”
So, yeah, gases are not exempt from freezing.
“Only one more step: Dess wanted to give the spear a thirty-nine-letter name,
but one that worked. A single word wasn’t going to cut it. She’d only ever found
a few chemical names that length, words used only by scientists, and they didn’t
seem to have much kick in the blue time. Not even slithers were afraid of names
like benzohydroxypentalaminatriconihexadrene”
So, what? The words need to be in common use for them to have power? I would really like an elaboration. Thematically, it’s so simply because such words are not exactly interesting to write about. There is just not much that can be done with them: no puns, no one-liners, no thematic connections. Mechanically, though, it’s rather weird they don’t work.
Dess then meets Rex at his house during the secret hour, and they go to Jessica, discussing the current situation on their way. Rex says Melissa is in her home, scanning the territory for psychic activity.
They discuss why there are so many darklings around and come to a conclusion that, like large cats, they sleep most of the time and only hunt one hour out of 24. Pretty sure large cats are a bit more active than that, even if they do sleep a lot.
“Well, the darklings
only live one hour in twenty-five, the secret hour. They’re frozen for the rest,
like regular people are frozen during the blue time. So it takes them
twenty-five of our days to live a single day in their life. That’s part of why
they live so long.”
So, yeah, they are frozen, they don’t disappear. The question is, where do they hide during the day? Can you find and kill them? That seems like a huge flaw in their plan to hide inside a secret hour if that makes them vulnerable for the rest of the time. And sure, the kids here don’t have the necessary resources to search the badlands for darklings, but surely the previous generations of Midnighters could do that. It just seems like an obvious thing to do.
In any case, that’s not what Dess and Rex are getting at. Instead, they postulate that since most of the time darklings are asleep, they see only a few of them at any given time, with the bulk of their numbers hidden. So, it’s not surprising there are so many darklings around, it’s surprising that they are all awake at the same time.
They meet Jessica then and discuss a plan of action. Rex says that darklings can sense new Midnighters arriving and whether their talent would be dangerous to them. Jessica attracting their attention then must mean they are scared of her. There is a way to determine one’s talent, but to do that, they need to go to the snake pit mentioned earlier, where the lore site is located.
Jessica decides to be dumb and says she won’t go anywhere during normal time since she’s grounded. OK, it’s admirable that she doesn’t like to worry her parents and accepts her punishment earnestly, but there are times when you should break the rules. Being hunted down by monsters with only one way and trying to find out how to fight back is one of those times. I mean, I’m pretty sure her parents would be more upset if Jessica were, you know, murdered than if she ran away for a few hours.
Jessica asks if they can get to the site during the secret hour, and Rex says that no, it’s pretty far away. She then asks if they can fly there, revealing her association with Jonathan. Rex isn’t pleased about it, while Dess is:
“What about flying?”
Rex’s jaw dropped, and then his eyes turned coldly toward Dess. She sighed
and spread her hands with a little shrug. There was no hope of avoiding blame.
Rex knew that Melissa would never have told Jonathan where Jess lived. For that
matter, if Dess hadn’t blabbed, Jonathan might not even have guessed that there
was a new midnighter in town. She tried to look sheepish.
But inwardly Dess smiled. Occasionally Rex needed to be reminded that nobody
had elected him seer.”
Eh, pretty petty and, as I said before, not the best idea to begin with.
Rex says that flying towards the badlands would be suicide with so many darklings around, but Jessica still refuses to go against her grounding, so for now the matter is dropped.
18
11:06 A.M.
NOTORIOUS
Jessica goes to school and discovers that rumors about her being detained with Jonathan have already spread among students. She is labeled a “bad girl,” and people act surprised seeing her attending school.
Constanza comes to the rescue, however, shooing away unwanted bystanders and reassuring Jessica that it’s all temporary.
Constanza is an interesting character. Going by the previous descriptions and the manner she acts, she falls into the mean popular girl archetype, only she isn’t, well, mean. Even though she pesters Jessica about what happened and asks if she and Jonathan are now an item (Jessica blushes and mumbles something to the effect that maybe, but probably not after the whole “Jonathan goes to prison because of me” thing), she is supportive to Jessica, says that the curfew law is stupid anyway and suggest writing an article painting the police in negative light (Jessica declines on account of not wanting more attention). She then invites Jessica to a party outside of town with some older boys at Rustle’s Bottom, a dried out lake. Jessica is still grounded, though, so she can’t go.
Basically, she appears like a nice enough girl, the only bad thing about her is giggling at another girl’s snide remark about Dess a few chapters back. It’s like the book understands that to be popular you need to be likeable or something. It’s a pretty novel experience in the context of YA fiction.
She is also another token non-white character, a Native American, which may have something to do with her portrayal. Or maybe not.
Anyway, they gossip some more, and then Jessica parts with Constanza citing needing to catch up on trigonometry. She goes to Dess, who is sitting in a library. They have a conversation about Jonathan, Dess admitting she wanted to surprise Jessica with his arrival, thinking that would cheer her up, and sharing her own experience of flying.
“A tiny and unexpected stab of annoyance went through Jessica. Almost
jealousy. But of course Jonathan had taken at least one of the other midnighters
flying. How else would he know how it worked? Still, flying had felt like a
private thing between the two of them.”
So, is flying a metaphor for sex now? You see, he’s experienced at this sort of thing because he practiced with Dess and Rex. Especially Rex, he was riding Jonathan every day all the way into snake pit. Not with Melissa, though, because she has a thing about skin contact (specifically, it amplifies her power, which is an unpleasant experience. Not sure how it fits into the metaphor).
Anyway, as I said before, going with Jonathan was a dumb idea, so Dess apparently encouraging it is a strike against her, but the attitude itself is actually nice. She really comes across as someone well-meaning but not exactly socially adept.
They then talk about the group dynamic and the thing between Jonathan and Rex.
“So all four of you have never worked together?”
“For about two weeks. When Jonathan arrived, he was just starting to discover
his power, his dream come true, when Rex and Melissa show up. Rex, of course,
wants to spend every night checking out lore.”
Jessica nodded. It must have been a lot easier for Rex to get out to his
precious lore sites with Jonathan’s help. It still would be.
“But Melissa and Jonathan never got along,” Dess added. “She’s never
even flown with him.”
“Really?”
“She couldn’t stand it. She has this thing about… holding hands.”
Jessica blinked. She’d been jealous of Dess a moment ago, but now she
couldn’t help feeling sorry for Melissa. Flying with Jonathan was the best part
of midnight.
“So Melissa gets left out of all these trips to the badlands, Jonathan gets
tired of being Rex’s personal flying chauffeur, and all hell breaks loose.”
Jessica swallowed. “I guess I can see where there might be a personality
conflict or two there.”
“Everything’s been messed up since then, really.” Dess looked down at the
floor. “Well, maybe it’s always been messed up.”
Basically, they had a lovers’ spat and broke up due to personal differences.
Jessica appears to warm up to Dess after that discussion, probably sympathizing with her circumstances and accepting her odd behavior.
We also learn that Rustle’s Bottom is conveniently pretty close to the snake pit. In fact, the snake pit is at the bottom of the former lake. Dess asks if there is a chance of Jessica convincing her parents to let her go there after all, Jessica says no. The topic is dropped, and they spend some time on trigonometry.
When Jessica exits school, she spots Jonathan approaching. He is out of the prison and came here to see her. They leave behind their respective guilt for getting each other into trouble that was going on the previous three chapters, and Jessica says she wants to fly again. Jonathan suggest to do it tonight because the both of them didn’t learn a thing.
Well, that’s it. In the previous post, an interesting point was made in comments by Wright of Void:
“It occurs to me that you might be able to test your theory that Jessica
was originally the only viewpoint character by seeing if her thirteenth chapter is something suitably climactic.”
Well, Jessica’s thirteenth chapter is either 17th or 18th, depending on how you restructure the book. 17th chapter certainly has a nice name, but the actual content is not that big of a deal. We just learn that Jessica is important and in danger, which is kinda obvious, given she’s different from other Midnighters, and the darklings are after her specifically. The point about darklings mostly sleeping but now being awake is interesting but not quite earth-shattering.
18th chapter is… Well, it’s mostly just a setup for future events.
So, yeah. I still think there is a merit in my theory about Jessica. Certainly, she is the most prominent character out of the bunch, being present in most chapters and serving as the audience surrogate. I just think the author missed on the opportunity to do invoke some symbolism with chapter numbers.
The post appears to be a bit short today since not that much happened in the three chapters. They are mostly a setup for future events. Initially I wanted to do an additional chapter, but the next one is about Melissa, and it’s going to be heavy. So, tune in next time to find out what our resident telepath is up to.