Waypoint High School Fanfic: Hammer & Pencil

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Waypoint High School Fanfic: Hammer & Pencil

For the last remaining Projection Clone at Waypoint High, making things had only ever been a duty.

Header Illustration by Sunless Design . Welcome to the Waypoint High School Class of 2016 Yearbook. We're giving out senior superlatives to our favorite games, digging into the year's biggest storiesvia extracurriculars , and following our favorite characters through their adventures together infanfic . See you in 2017!

Once, their footsteps would spill like glass beads out into the tiled hallway. Light and hard and many and directly on the heels of that first bell, there was a crisp resonance as they emerged from the doorways. They flowed like streams joining a river, only to branch out again when they each arrived to their next period classroom. They never milled about, an army of strong minds and wide, glossy eyes occupied with a perpetual purpose. To the projection clones, the end of one task only ever meant the start of another, and so they had moved throughout the school accordingly.

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That was how it used to be, at least, and while she didn't quite know if she was looking back on those times fondly, she certainly knew that something was amiss in the way things were for her now.

She was rarely the first in her seat back then, yet now she had minutes that seemed to stretch like years before even the teacher would join her. Moments all to herself in empty classrooms, as the other students milked every spare moment in the hallway before the second bell would coax them in. While they laughed and filled the tiled halls with a clamouring, chaotic din, that last individual clone waited for her lessons to start. Hands folded, ankles crossed, eyes forward.

Two minutes, and her eyes darted keen as a bird's to the pencil sitting parallel to the edge of her desk. Another beat and she broke her trained posture, picking the implement up and angling her thumb over the eraser. Two clicks, and she held the mechanism open so she could nudge a single millimeter of lead back into the barrel. She returned both her pencil and her hand to their places.

Mechanical pencils never needed to be sharpened, and that's why they used them. They marked the page strongly and crisply with lines easily read. You could still erase your mistakes, but there was no losing the details, no dull-tipped ambiguity or clumsy smudges.

Whether there had been something missing back then, she couldn't really say; there had never been the time to assess. They had goals to meet and standards to raise to get the school in line with board expectations. Low scores meant low funding for the fledgling academy, then low enrollment in turn, and a slow and steady decline into a pit they might never climb back out of. Obvious that was undesirable, so she and her sisters (could they be called as much? It seemed a little too intimate, in hindsight) had been a means to that end. Purpose-built, they were the vital little blood cells coursing through the body of this building, flushing it with the life and strength it had so sorely lacked when they first arrived.

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They had done their work well, and it was their nature to move on when that work was done—to make way for a population who would benefit from what they had built. None of it was ever theirs to keep. No, it was all numbers on a page somewhere. Not even a page in her hands that she could see and feel, but out in the ether or in the possession of some bureaucrat somewhere. Regardless, numbers had brought her sisters there, and numbers had sent them away again.

Not her, though. The numbers kept her there still; specifically one thin column that had come up one thin figure short.

That one thin figure meant that she hadn't been asked to make way for anyone, and so she remained. Hands folded, ankles crossed, eyes forward. Outside she heard books shifting in arms, padlocks and zippers, someone crowing in delight and someone else snapping a lipbalm closed. Second bell.

She had never stopped in the hall before. She had never just stood in that space—her road, their concourse. The student with the misfortune of walking behind her just then was as surprised as she when the patter of her stiff leather shoes stopped. He sidestepped with a pointed look at the mushroom-like bob of hair sitting atop her shoulders, sneakers whining as he diverted his frame around hers at the last minute.

Mechanical pencils never needed to be sharpened, and that's why they used them.

Sawdust has a particular scent to it. Earthy sweetness, sharp and arresting. But for as many times as she'd strode purposefully past the machine-filled manufacturing workshop she'd never actually registered that smell. She'd never registered the workshop itself, either. But now that she was peering in through the double doors that had been wedged open for ventilation's sake, she realized how different the room was from every other in the school. It was three times as large for one thing, with a scratched-up glass partition between the stools and tables that made the place vaguely resemble a classroom and the drills and saws that made it seem anything but.

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Yet what was in this room was of less interest to her than who: a single student working on something at an almost possessed pace. Pippa was a memorable classmate. Not the most memorable, certainly, but in a school overflowing with uniqueness she still didn't fade into the background.

The oblique angle of her ponytail helped, as did the guileless way she would ask to borrow a pen, a pencil, a sheet or four of paper from whoever was seated nearest at the start of any class they'd ever shared. She did, at the very least, return what she could when she was finished, and that was likely why the single remaining projection clone within the student body didn't have a wholly unfavorable impression of her. She seemed earnest, and earnestness in turn seemed rare.


Related, from Waypoint: Make sure to check out yesterday's yearbook fic, "The Coven", which features characters from Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Mystic Messenger, and Overwatch!


Earnest as she was, though, she wasn't exactly the second one to make her way into class. She was usually last if she wasn't late or altogether absent, and it was easy to assume this was proof of a lazy nature (a cardinal sin so far as clones were ever concerned.) That said, there was nothing lazy in the way she worked now. Nothing flaky about the eking out of a few precious extra moments in the gap between bells for… For… "What is that?"

The softness of a seldom-used voice calling out from the doorway couldn't compete against the whirr of the scroll saw. When no answer followed, she took a few steps in—enough to bring her to the dirty glass divider. A rap of knuckles on it and the sawband stilled as Pippa lifted her eyes from her work.

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The projection clone repeated, "What is that you're doing?"

The other girl pulled the plastic goggles she was wearing up onto her brow, carelessly mussing her ruler-straight black fringe in the process. Pippa lifted her piece off the machine's table, holding it up for her to make sense of. A little block of wood, irregularly shaped as if it had previously been scrap, with the silhouette of a cat traced but only half carved out.

"Keychain!" Pippa beamed. The stare that met this answer was doubtful enough that the other girl began pointing to indicate a little hole already drilled at the nape of the figure's neck. "The hardware'll go here!" "Hardware?" "The, like, chain bits?" "And then what?" "And then, you know… My keys?" "Your keys?"

She was lucky enough that Pippa didn't read the incredulousness in her voice as slight or sarcasm. It wasn't. "That would be why I'm making a keychain, yeah," she replied, tugging her goggles back into place and setting her project back in place against the blade. The saw roared back to life and Pippa carried on with her work, doing her level best to ignore the wide, glossy eyes following every curve and angle she made in it.

That said, there was nothing lazy in the way she worked now.

For every other student's wide-eyed intentions for their future, the projection clone's hard work had never seemed to be building to anything. Her classmates' purpose was still inbound. But for the projection clones, purpose was only ever what they were doing, and what they had always done, and what they were meant to continue doing wherever they were most needed. Those numbers on those pages, wherever they were, certainly hadn't ever been for her benefit. It wasn't meant to bring her anything at all. There was no end outside of executing on the means to it with precision, perfection, and diligence.

But this wasn't a number, and it wasn't out in the ether. This was something she could turn over in her small, strong hands, feeling the roughness of unfinished surfaces before she would shape them down to suit her liking. A keychain or a rattle, a shelf or a box. Whatever it was that week, it was something she could keep—the proof that she'd been there, and that she'd done something while she was—held in her hands and no one else's. Mechanical pencils never needed to be sharpened, and that was why she liked them. They marked the wood strongly and crisply with lines easily read. You could follow them even though the sawdust, and sand them away when you were done.