Colorless Chapter 3

Vex was holding my hand, dragging me around stores and restaurants. She would collect a variety of food and comfort items, go through everything, realize it was over $50, and put it all back. We’re in round 4 and a pillow shaped like a cat pushed us over. This is truly hell.

I was trying to read her mind, but everywhere I started stopped abruptly. Most people think in paths that lead to more knowledge for me to gain. A dirt path treaded often is the easiest to follow. But Vex didn’t have something she thought about often. She cut through forests so they would grow back behind her. She never had to return to a thought, after all. The careless wanderer simply wonders, never settling down.

“This is just a night, right?” I ask. “We don’t need a million things.”

She looks to me, offended. “A sleepover is a sacred thing! Plus, Ordi’s Arena is on tonight, so I’ll need lots of chips. And then your room doesn’t have decorations, so we’ll need to grab something for that-”

I drag her down the nearby art aisle and grab a pink $1 posterboard and a nice $2 gel pen. “Got decorations.”

“You need more than that.”

I glare at her for a moment, eventually walking off to the bedding aisle to glance around. I select a cheap, fuzzy blanket that would make me happy. I lead her off to the snack aisle and wave a hand around to say, “Pick.” I’ve never seen any of these bags before, so I pick out a large bag of white cheddar puffs. She comes back with a green bag of chips and a blue box of cookies.

“We’ll get real food, too?”

She smiles and yells, “Pizza or burgers?”

“I, uh,” I attempt to dig into her head, finding nothing involving pizza or hamburgers. I’ve made chips before, but I’ve never heard of the foods she’s talking of. “I don’t care.”

“Okay! Burgers with curly fries it is!”

I nod and follow along, blankly staring at boxes of frozen food in glass freezers. Things… come… frozen? Aside from ice cream and some medications? Ew. Wouldn’t that just be an ungodly mixture of crunching, melting, and dealing with extra water that gets trapped in the food? I look at a bag of frozen salmon and try not to gag.

“Onion-broth burgers, my favorite!” Vex places a box on the pile of items I’m holding. “And buffalo-flavored fries! Oh, oh, I’m gonna get chocolate milk!” She throws the bag at my head and runs off. I just… stand there. Completely dumbfounded. I don’t get her. Are all girls my age or younger like this? She comes back and hits my shoulder with a gallon of brown milk.

“Ow.”

“We have fifteen dollars left! Let’s get…” She drags me along, grabbing two things, and leading me to the checkout. I cannot see due to the bag of cold fries on my face. I sigh and throw everything down on the grocery line I see out of the corner of my eye. I turn and stretch, finally free from my mule treatment. Vex jumps with glee and I eye up a row of wrapped, unrefrigerated food. Yeah, no, I won’t like that. I try to get a better idea of what it is, but Vex is thinking about a carton of premade iced coffee in the last-minute purchase area. She grabs it and throws it on the machine. I turn and look to the ground as Vex talks with the cashier and pays. She pushes all the bags onto me and leads me back to the apartment.

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“Put the oven to 375! We gotta hurry, it’s almost on!” She hurriedly rustles through the bags of groceries. Pulling out the burgers and fries, she rips them open and messily tosses them onto a baking sheet.

“What?” I ask, not sure how to operate the oven. The one I had was operated by someone with orange eyes, and it was a woodstove. She rushes over, rushing the buttons and throwing the pans in. She grabs two glasses, the coffee, and the popcorn and chips. She childishly skips to her room, setting up a comfortable mess to lay in.

Flipping on the TV, a woman’s voice announces, “Welcome to Miss Ordi’s Arena! I’m Liv Ordi, and you’re about to see the power of Axel Rivet against our current fighter, who wishes to be anonymous. Now the rules are simple: fight our three fighters, me, and our champion. Win against everyone, and you become the next champion! For each win the fighter gets, they’re awarded $2500. Are we ready?”

A loud applause hit the crowd as two people walked out on field. One was the black man, Axel, who had one green eye and one brown eye, muscular legs, and hair that was styled after Jean-Michel Basquiat. He wore a strange green jumpsuit with a zipper down the front and big shoulder pads. The fighter wore a white jumpsuit and a visor over their eyes.

“So,” Vex asks, “you know how eye colors work, right?”

I nod and open my popcorn, biting into one. It’s… good.

“Say it. I wanna make sure.” She smirks and stares at me as if she’s won. This is basic stuff, and the thought of her doubting me angered me.

“Each eye color means you have power over something. Brown is knowledge, violet-”

“Purple.”

“Violet is energy, blue is body, green is problems, yellow is decay, orange is elements, red is life, and pink is mind and soul. Heterochromia can affect powers in two ways: monoskill and biskill. Monoskill means they combine into one, like your mom, I think. She controls smoke and it causes mental effects.”

“Yeah.”

“Then biskill means it’s two separate abilities.”

“Yep! So, this dude, Axel,” she points to the screen as he gets knocked to the ground, “is kind of weird. He says he’s monoskill, but people theorize he’s biskill. He has knowledge over machines and their problems, but- and this is fun- guess what?”

I look back at the screen, seeing him get back up. He dashes to the sidelines at top speeds and comes back with a chainsaw. Oh, there’s a weapon stash over there. The girl sends a little cloud with a face on it over to him, the little creature lights up with electricity.

“I think the girl has orange eyes.”

“Go back to Axel.” I watch as he tosses the inactive chainsaw at her. Midair, it revs up and hits the girl on the arm.

“He controls machines?” Axel grabs another chainsaw to hurl, but a cloud creature strikes him with a fist-sized hailstone, bloodying his head and knocking him out.

“Oh, beautiful Axel, how you try and how you fail.” She looked on with enjoyment and happiness. I could tell she had a “celebrity crush”, but she also identified with him. Truthfully, I’ve only seen green eyes in tales where they are the problem. Green eyes are characterized as trouble, brown eyes are shown as the “commoner”, but here you have a guy that shatters the expectations, looking just as bizarre as what his abilities might be.

“Next up will be the punching dude. Not a big fan of his. He’s kinda cool, though. Smite, the guy, is like, a really old boxer that’s in his fifties. He’s got blue eyes, and he puts a ton of power into his punches. But, with how old he is, he’s pretty easy to knock down.” She talks mindlessly, staring at Axel and still pitying him.

“He’s a glass cannon?” I asked, mostly to say something I thought she wouldn’t know so I could seem smarter.

“What? I guess. Then, it’ll be Exi Severd, with red and orange eyes, and then Miss Ordi with her red and yellow eyes, and finally, the Champion.” She looks at me slyly with a smile.

“And the Champion has?”

“Pink eyes.”

And then, unsurprisingly, I had an Axel to look up to.

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I pulled out the food, a little crisp, and waited for the next break. I was uninterested in the other fighters for now. I only wanted to know about the Champion, and the rest seemed like filler.

I opened the dingy brown cabinet to look for the buns, as Vex instructed me. Buns, ketchup, mayo, and dill relish. On the top shelf, there were three bags of bread stacked together: potato, wheat, and buns, along with rice and noodles. Middle shelf, drink mixes. Bottom shelf, cans and sauces. I grab the buns and whip around to the fridge. Ketchup, dill, and mayo. I think a moment.

“Hey, Vex?”

“Yeah?”

“What do ketchup, dill, and mayo look like?”

I can hear her sigh, then stomp off. “Ordi’s winning, she won’t be a champion. She’ll still be fighting the Champion, though. I know your excited for that. Go watch the match and catch me up when I get back.”

I walk back and sit in front of the TV. Ordi had an interesting ability: she kept creating tigers and the such to strike the fighter. The fighter kept summoning her cloud monsters, which would focus on the animals directly endangering the fighter. While this was happening, Ordi would pet or punch at the cloud monsters, causing them to age rapidly and die off in a fit of lightning. The fighter was getting weak, to the point they couldn’t stand.

A bear jumps forward to strike, and in the air between the jump and the gasping fighter, the beast turns from haired, to hairless, to decomposing, to bones, to dust. Ordi throws her hands up. The round is won by the fighter in an act of pity and drama. The crowd erupts, booing and cheering from all sides. She walks off the field, strutting in confidence.

A song began to play, the “Pink Panic”, traditionally played on an autoharp. Before the lyrics can start, a man emerges from the same door Ordi exited from. His white hair trailed behind him, flowing in the wind. It had to be butt-length at least. The crowd gasped, then cheered. He seemed odd, wearing an open pink suit and pants, a purplish-blue shirt, and dark purple leather straps that looked strange with his pastel clothes. The leather straps looked like something you’d see in a weird comic, but I think it was more for looks than for anything weird. He was outstanding.

Vex comes back in, balancing everything like a waiter. I tell her as she puts down a bowl of fries and a plate of burgers, “Ordi threw the match, they’re fighting the champion now.”

“She didn’t throw it. If it’s clear the fighter will lose against Exi or Miss Ordi, they’ll stop the battle so they can still fight the Champion. They won’t win, but people love him, so…”

I lean into the TV and dip a fry into the bowl of ranch she brought. I watch the way the Champion moves: rhythmically, posing often, like he was always ready for a picture.

“The others are less showy. He seems to be more of a model than a Champion.”

The fighter runs at him and, in a single punch to the chest, they fly fifty feet and hit the ground, getting knocked out. Their clothes are cracking apart like glass, revealing her orange bra.

“Well, yeah. People don’t usually have pink eyes, and eye color is important to people. But, really— who has pink eyes? Aside from you.”

I think for a moment. “So, the others can focus on relatability and representing their eye colors, but he has to resort to being a show?”

“Well,” she thinks for a moment, then throws out, “I’m sure they get paid for just this. But now that I think about it, yeah. I follow all of them on Tumblgram, and most of them have, like, lives. Axel and Exi are dating, and Exi does a lot of community stuff. Axel’s more of an introvert. Smite owns a dog kennel and has a son that’s living a weird life as some kind of traveller. Ordi owns the entire floating arena and has partial ownership in a ton of companies. She’s a millionaire with ties to the Emperor.”

My hand jerks to my shoulder. It’s still a little bruised. “Interesting.”

“She also has a weird drug company. Hues, I think it’s called.” She scrolls through her phone, looking through the Champion’s blog, full of skin tones and pinks.

“Yeah,” I whimper, remembering that gross grape flavor, “I’ve heard of it.”

“You’re right about the Champion. He posts nothing but his eyes and his body. Like, look.” She shows me a picture of the tan, light-haired man leaning back, staring seductively at the camera. His pink eyes are emphasized to the point they look fake. She scrolls to the next picture. “Woke up like this <3.” Next. “Pink eyes just reflect the light so well <3.” Next. “Thirsty?”

“Okay, so he has a career based on being young and pretty.”

“Yeah, but I gotta say,” she leans into her phone and smirks, “he does it well.” She looks to me, then to the picture. She holds up her phone and compares. After a moment, she decides to say, “Oh, your eyes are a lot paler.”

“His eyes look fake.”

“Nah,” she looks at the picture again, “his eyes are just brighter.”

I groan and bite into a burger. It’s good.

“Hey, how old are you?” She grabs a burger as well and begins to chow down.

“Uh, sixteen.”

“Oh.” She murmurs something to herself, then stares at me. “Late bloomer?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“I’ll go with yes. I’ll see if mom can explain things to you, but moving on from that,” she bites into a burger and reaches her arm into the air, “we’re moving into the city soon. That means we’ll be closer to the floating arena-”

“Cool!”

“-and closer to overthrowing the government!”

“What?!” When was this the goal? I read her mind to see nothing but a painting, one of Castle Rosegold falling.

“That’s what Thorn is all about! Let’s watch Kars 2! This is the one where he comes back to Earth!”

“No, go back-”

“I’ll get my mom to go over that stuff with you, okay? No politics at sleepovers!” She follows up in a cutesy voice, “This ain’t no turkey dinner!”