"Locke, hey, earth to Locke? You look like you saw a ghost." Yuna asked, leaning towards him.
"Shit, shit," Locke didn't notice though, and took out his phone and fired off a text to Alice.
LOCKE: Is a cheerleader with you right now? Goes by Lucy?
No reply came back, which was normal. Alice was proud to be a nerd and wouldn't answer a text during a lecture. She might even have turned her phone offer. Or Lucy was in the middle of transforming her into some kind of soul-sucking succubus. Locke switched tactics and fired off a text to Chaos this time.
LOCKE: I need to find Alice and/or Lucy, can you help?
It didn't take long for him to get a response.
CHAOS: sure why not
Locke stared at his phone for a few seconds, but Chaos didn't continue from there.
LOCKE: Can you tell me where they are?
CHAOS: don't see 'em
CHAOS: remember that hitch?
CHAOS: we can do one thing in the contest, and I already blew my load all over you
CHAOS: but I'm walking around, sticking my head into classes
CHAOS: i'll let you know if they turn up
CHAOS: oh, but since I can't use my powers, that means that the game is still going
CHAOS: and that means Lucy hasn't done anything yet so you've still got time
"Locke...?" Yuna asked, concern plain in her voice.
"Not now, Suh... Yuna." Locke turned away from her.
Yuna must have not liked that, because she grabbed Locke's wrist and spun him right back around to face her. Given the difference in size between the two (the new Locke had more than a foot on the new Yuna), that should have been impossible. But his surprise left him off guard.
She stared up at him, a stubborn look of I've had enough of your nonsense that he'd seen only a handful of times from Sun. And it was no less effective on her pretty face.
"You're acting very weird," she said. "Come on, dude. You're my best friend. You wanna tell me what's going on here?"
"You wouldn't understand, it's..." Locke trailed off, stopping to actually consider it for a moment.
Did he want to explain all this craziness to Yuna? Fate of the world, a trio of unbelievably hot women competing with him as the judge... keeping something like that to himself sounded impossible when he thought about it. And like Yuna had said, they were best friends; a bit of a surprise to Locke, since he'd have assumed Yuna's best friend would have been Alice.
Except... Yuna wasn't his best friend. Sun was. And it was his fault that Sun had gotten caught up in all of this insanity. How would Yuna react if she knew that truth? But... didn't she deserve to know?
"God, would you stop that smoldering look? It's making me shy, dude," Yuna said, taking a step back, fingers reaching up to tease her hair. Locke remembered then that Sun/Yuna wasn't the only one who'd been changed, and maybe Yuna's transformation might not be such a bad thing. And what good would telling her do?
On the other hand, being able to share the rest? He was dying to talk to someone about it.
"Hrm... fine, alright. Follow me."
He took Yuna by the hand and led her to the art room. Budget cuts meant that it only had classes in the afternoon and the door was kept locked, but it was old, and you just had to twist the knob a certain way to get it open.
He closed the door behind him, then added a second layer of privacy, going into the supply closet and shutting that door behind them too.
"Oh wow... we're really doing this, huh? I'm on the pill, but I th-think we should start with, um...some touching first?" Yuna squeaked, her voice at a stage whisper.
"Huh?" Locke.
"What?" Yuna looked at him, just as confused.
"I'm not... that's not why I brought you in here! I just wanted have some privacy while we talked."
"Oh. Ohhh... yeah. Yeah, I mean... urgh..." Yuna covered her face in both hands, leaned back against the wall. "Just forget all that then, would you?"
"Already forgotten," Locke lied. A hot goth Asian chick had just offered him a handjob. Even if that had been Sun an hour ago, it'd gotten his heart racing a mile a minute. But as much as he wanted to explore it, there was something more important to talk about.
"Do you remember two years ago when you took your mom's car out after dark to go to that concert? We put it into neutral and rolled it out onto the street to be sneaky, and then the headlight shone right into your parent's bedroom."
Yuna blinked.
"Uhm...yeah," she said. "Mom was mad about the car, but way, way more mad that I was sneaking off with a boy."
She looked confused, and so was he. It was the funhouse mirror version of memory they had together. Typical teen shenanigans. But the memory Yuna had of it gave it an entirely new context. Even so, Locke was convinced that Yuna was still Sun, deep down inside. And Sun had always had the patience of a saint whenever Locke needed someone to talk to.
"It's going to sound crazy, but... okay, this morning I met three girls."