Fifth Interlude
“Explain to me again how it’s a good idea?” grumbled Alejandro.
“It’s to keep you safe –err, safer!” chirped Lindsey, literally bouncing up and down in her seat.
“Yes. And it has nothing to do with the fact that you’ll get to wrestle with giant gators strong enough to give pause to the less crazier MAJORS, of course” snarked the young man.
“Come on, you know it’ll be fun!” laughed Lindsey. “Little old me against a monstrous prehistoric reptile fully focused on eating the poor but still very brave little soldier, cheering on me! Doesn’t it sound awesome?”
“Yawn” replied Alejandro, still smiling despite himself.
Lindsey had been very persuasive. It wasn’t even 48h hours that they had arrived in New Orleans and, after hearing Jim Paolini talking about the giant alligators roaming around here, They had barely had Internet going before she had dived right into it, searching all there was to know about the beasts. And of course, the license needed to fight with them add been a relatively easy find. Which meant that the next few hours, as they had barely started working on their moving, had been spent with the pre-teen pestering Alejandro until he gave up and allowed her to inscribe to the next session, which was the very tomorrow.
“Come on! Can you believe it!? You’ll get to live with an officer of New Orleans’ county! An official city’s worker, isn’t it awesome?”
“It would be a lot more awesome if I hadn’t to step in with you in the danger zone” signaled the Minor, has the jeep they were in jumped on the pot-holed road. “I mean, have you read the brochure? “Risk of maiming for our minor’s friends!”, it’s written black on white.”
“It’s blue on yellow, actually” petulantly corrected Lindsey, still clearly far too excited about it all to care about the dangers he was pointing out.
“Oh, it makes a world of difference then. But in case you have forgotten, I’ve already lost one limb, and I would like to keep the remaining three, and my head… and my life, now that I think about it!” yelled Alejandro, to be heard over the suddenly blaring jazz music of the Ranger’s jeep.
“You fine back here?” roared the massive man, his muscular arms, quite like to small trees, covered in tribal tattoos. “Remember that you can back down anytime you want, little dude! Nobody will mock you for being a total pussy loser, I swear!” he added, flashing an arrogant and condescending smile at the Minor.
Alejandro knew full well that he was goaded into letting his pride get the better of him, but knowing it and avoiding this pitfall was another thing entirely. Somehow, that guy reminded him of Joseph : loud, obnoxious and over all arrogant to the point that he was insufferable. And he had spent ten years after the Incident forcing himself to act contrary to what those peoples expected off a minor. Obviously, that jerk wanted him to give up, since he hadn’t liked how independent and talkative Alejandro had been when he had come to pick them up. And thus, the Minor went along with the craziness.
“I’m fine! If an alligator can endure being tortured daily by the likes of you, I can suffer being put in the pit with one for ten minutes!” shot back the one-armed man.
“Sure. Just try to not pee on you, little dude! I don’t want piss in my car after you get rescued from the pit, with your sister’s sent to the hospital.”
“You better watch your tongue, moron!” spat Lindsey, “or driver or not, I’ll shove your head in your motor and we’ll see if you care to open your trap once more!”
“Ah! Got some fire in you kiddo! Perhaps Ol’Bessie won’t be able to chew you. She’ll just swallow you whole” sneered the Ranger, before focusing back on the road, will the two Ferrand seethed in the back of the rusty jeep.
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“Jesus fucking Christ!” screamed Alejandro, his voice incredibly shrill has he jumped to the left to avoid the monstrous maws from closing on his torso.
Deep down, he probably knew that he hadn’t been in danger at all, since Lindsey had caught the beast as it raced forward and had managed to raise it over her head, straining visibly but still sending it away. The Minor’s heart was still racing at a dangerously fast pace, a weakness overcoming his legs and his arm. The two instructors down in the pit with him and Lindsey, veterans of those trials, were closer to him than the beast had ever been, but it didn’t lessen the primal fear he felt.
“Good throw” bellowed one of them, talking to Lindsey. “But it’s a risky move if there is bystanders around, young lady. What would you do then?”
“It would throw it back in the water or where there is the less peoples, and rush toward him!” explained Lindsey, doing just what she was saying.
Only MAJORS could actually find the idea to merge a theoretical test with a practical examination. From his point of view, it was utter madness, especially considering the fact that the alligator used for Lindsey’s application was a pure monster. It wasn’t Ol’Bessie, the grand-mother of this whole brood of enlarged reptiles, thankfully, but Little Jack was anything but little. In fact, he was 5m45 (17 f 9) in length, probably weighing around six hundred kilograms (1322,8 lbs). Common Gators were usually found between 4,60 m (15 f 1) and 3 m (9 f 10) in length, weighing up to 453 kg (999 lbs) depending on the gender, as his sister had explained ad nauseam when trying – and succeeding- to take the test with her to avoid paying a vast sum of money for a Minor assistant.
“Good. But remember, the best way to deal with a Gator on a rampage is ?” asked the second Ranger, a lithe but still impressive woman with raven hair and a white skin tanned by a life in the wilderness of Lousiana.
“Force its mouth close and use your superior strength to force him down, in a chokehold!” yelled Lindsey as she stopped Little Jack in its tracks as it came at her angrily.
Alejandro stumbled backward in the muddy soil. His body shivered as his little sister wrestled with the gator. After what felt like minutes but couldn’t have been more than a dozen seconds, Lindsey brought it firmly under her, her arms around its maw to force it shut. The alligator tried to break her hold by trashing violently, but Lindsey was basically laying on it at that point and she simply endured this extremely violent rodeo. She let out a howl of pure joy, obviously enjoying the whole thing. The other MAJORS around them, outside and inside the cage laughed heartily.
Little Jack suddenly stopped moving, and Alejandro expected Lindsey to let go of it, but instead she seemed to put even more strength behind her hold. The animal suddenly darted for the water, but the far smaller MAJOR managed to dig her feet in the mud and prevented it from reaching the safety of the brown waters, where it would have been at an advantage to deal with her. Finally, the gator stopped all his struggle and, while Lindsey waited for another act of defiance which never came.
“Congratulation, kid” bellowed one of the Ranger. “You’re officially allowed to deal with the gators of New Orleans! Try not to get eaten!”
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“It was awesome!” screamed Lindsey in the center’s showers, which were, much to Alejandro’s chagrin, shared between MAJOR women and all the Minors.
“It was insanity at its finest you mean” grumbled the young man, sitting as far away as possible from the streams of hot water, still clothed.
It was one thing to have grown accustomed to his body and its many scars over the last year or so. It was another whole beast altogether to actually share a shower room with his little baby sister, let alone three other, adult, MAJORS who didn’t even try to hide their lustful gaze from him. Meaning that he was stuck in his muddied and smelly clothes, feeling, dirty, hot and bothered by the whole thing, and would remain as such for the next few hours.
“Come on ‘Rando! It was fun, you’ve got to admit it!”
“I’ll have you know that fun isn’t synonymous with being put into mortal danger. You can have perfect fun safe at home, instead of counting the teeth in a giant dinosaur coming to eat you.
“Crocodilians aren’t dinosaurs, silly” corrected his little sister, taking a professorial tone. “Those families diverged hundreds of millions of years ago. In fact, birds…”
“Yeah, yeah. From my point of view, gigantic lizards are dinosaurs. Deal with it, Alligator Lindsey-dee!”
“Humpf! It’s not like that that you’ll succeed at school ‘Rando. It’s a bad mentality to not care about such important differences. And don’t call me that, I’m not some stereotypical Aussie!”
“Sure… Care to remind me where Austria is?” asked the Minor, sounding all detached just to see if his little sister would fail at such a simple test of geography.
“Well, it’s on the other side of the world silly, in Oceania.”
“Nope. Austria is in Europe, Australia is in Oceania. How can you hope to succeed in school if you don’t care about such important differences” he mimicked her with a stupid tone.
“I don’t talk like that!” yelled Lindsey, her tanned skin darkening with a mixture of embarrassment, anger and what her brother suspected was shame at mocking him, even a little. “And who care about geography anyway!?” she huffed, trying to downplay the whole thing. “And won’t you prepare for the shower? Nobody will take you in their car smelling like that!”
“Don’t tell me you want to get naked here. With you?” he replied, adding in his mind “And them” thinking about the other MAJORS giggling while the two siblings argued.
“Oh…” replied Lindsey, her face becoming even redder.
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Alejandro sighed in delight as he went into the garden of the monstrous manor that Shannon had somehow bought for him. He shuddered a little, the very idea of possession something so vast, so full of state of the art kitchen, restroom, showers, and the crazy fancy pool in the garden, was simply too much for him. He couldn’t fathom yet how he could give it all away without putting Lindsey’s future in danger, should anything happen to him, but…. A sudden splashing of water was all the warning the young man had.
“LINDSEY!” he bellowed as he jumped away from the alligator who had rushed from the pool to try and eat him alive.
Thank god for the shallow end of the pool, thought the Minor. Without it, the predator probably would have been able to jump at him without making enough noise for the Minor to notice it. Which only gave him a respite, because if his sister didn’t rushed to his help, his trip to New Orleans would probably take a turn for the worst. I wonder if Shannon will somehow push a law to kill all the gators if I get killed by one?
The absurdity of this idea would have brought a smile on his face at any other time, but right now he was too terrified to do anything but scream, run and hope for some help. A loud bang signaled the opening of the heavy garden’s door, and with a might roar, Lindsey slammed into the beast. It was only then that Alejandro realized that it was far smaller than Little Jack. It couldn’t have been more than two meters (6 f 6) in length and his little sister easily overpowered it, then raised it over her head and got up to leave.
“I’ll be back, get inside” she ordered.
Less than five minutes later, she was back, her phone out and signaling the incident to the authorities. She let herself fall alongside him, her taller and heavier frame slightly displacing him in the process, and she produced a cup of hot chocolate. Without a word, Alejandro took it, too ashamed at his reaction to talk. It was one thing to know how strong Lindsey was compared to him, and another one altogether to witness it. It was terribly shaming for him, it made him feel inadequate, even more so than usual, and all his insecurities were thus bubbling up.
“Well… that certification sure came in handy” awkwardly said his little sister, trying to break the silence.
“Yeah, sure…” mumbled the Minor, looking into the dark liquid in his cup as if it held the secrets of a better life.
“So… Herm… you know, it wasn’t that bad, I mean, no Minor could do anything against an alligator, at least not in the way we MAJORS do and…”
“Lindsey” cut her off Alejandro. “If I ever, never, again hear about alligators and all the jazz about them, it’ll still be too soon.”
“Well, New Orleans is renowned for her jazz scene, you know?” taunted his little sister.
“You’re so dead, Lindsey Emilia Amandine Ferrand…” growled Alejandro before tasting his chocolate. “Plus, you’ve put sugar in my cup and now it taste terrible.”