Grim Or Grin

Chapter 20 (reconstructed): Zen

A/N: Warning: Chapter contains details on food (again ;)). You may get hungry.

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Chapter 20: Zen

An unusually thick slice of ham sat on a porcelain plate in front of me with two sides - potato salad and garden salad drizzled with goma sauce (Japanese sesame salad dressing). 'Ravenous' was the best description for how hungry I felt before wolfing down the deliciously saltish meat and refreshing sides. This was a very late lunch and I was more than grateful that Pam had taken the liberty to get Cole's and my food before a snaking queue from the lunch buffet formed.

"Thanks, Pam," I said. She sat across from me and Cole, beside Leo. The table we sat at was the usual canteen tables that dotted the canteen floors in schools - a rectangular table with two similarly shaped benches on either lengths of the table. The bench could usually fit four people but some of the larger sized, buffer operatives reduced the capacity to about three people. Their lunch hall was another huge dome like structure with colours stretching down from the top of the dome - blue, pink, grey and white. 'The types of people here,' I thought. I knew the blue and grey stood for strategists and trained operatives but pink and white? One of them was probably representing the specialists. "What's the white and pink stand for?"

"You know how you got the right sized clothing?" Leo replied. "The pink represents information gatherers or 'stalkers' as we call them. They are skilled in gaining information about people especially via social media platforms. The white represents specialists."

"It's white because it's the easiest colour to change or 'specialise' in a sense," Pam added. 'That makes sense,' I thought for some reason there was a nagging feeling in my head that this 'white' was familiar. I saw it somewhere before... 'What is it?' I thought.

'The chess set,' I recalled. During the tea party, Dee Dee had walked towards a chess set I had not noticed before. It was mostly hidden behind the garden foliage. From the frequent little spacings between the floral plants, the chessboard had glistened slightly. It was a glass chessboard. Instead of having a black and white checkered board, the board had transparent and frosted glass squares. There were mismatched dark brown and white chess pieces, the very same white. Dee Dee had handed me the brown pieces - a King and a Pawn.

-Recollection-

"When do we get our assigned code names?" Cole asked, reminding me about it. 'What would our code names be?' I wondered curiously. Maybe it was just based on the chess pieces? After all, she was probably the one who gave Cole and Daemon the envelop. Maybe the chess pieces represented us?

"Never," she replied and giggled when my face wore what must have been a look of surprise. 'Never?' "Big Brother and Sister will be a team so Dee Dee will give a team code name," she explained. "The King and the Pawn." Her brown eyes mixed in with flecks of gold amusement and excitement flicked from me to Cole when she said that.

She went of to the chess set behind the foliage, returned with two dark brown chess pieces and handed them to me. "Keep Dee Dee's gift well and get Zenny as co-head."

-End of recollection-

'If the white chess pieces represented changeable, did mine represent hard to change?' I wondered. "Who're you choosing as your mentors?" Leo asked.

"So far, we're planning to choose Zen," Cole replied, purposefully hiding the fact that Dee Dee was our head mentor. I played along by nodding.

"He's very hard to get as a mentor. Every year, it's the same. Catch him and he'll be your mentor," Pam responded. "By catch, I mean a tap on the shoulder or something like that will do but he always keeps the catchers in sight. Best of luck."