2nd part. Sorry for a short update

Another report came in. This time, it was directly from a palace guard instead of the pocket watch.

“Head Guard, sir, while we searching the palace for Her Majesty, we found, an unidentified body in the study.”

Upon hearing that, the man stood up from his seat, and turned to the Guard. His face was struck with fear and confusion.

“Threat status?”

“The man has been dead for several hours now, we presume. As you said earlier, His Majesty Emperor has been secured, and the Hounds haven’t found any suspicious scents. ”

“So that’s how it is. Has the Emperor been informed?”

“No, not yet sir. I thought I’d report things to you first.”

“Affirmative. Return to your post immediately.”

“Certainly sir.” The Guard turned on his heels and hurried out the room.

 “Attention. This is Apollo. Personnel still in palace grounds, report in.”

A few voices responded.

“Tighten perimeter. We’ve got a body inside. Perpetrator might not be alone. Capture any threats alive.”

A collective affirmation echoed through the voice transmitting pocket watch.

Then the man turned to his subordinates inside the room and spoke, “I will break the news to His Majesty myself. I’ll leave the communications to you, Sid.”

“Yes,sir!” Sid replied.

“Well what is the news then, Apollo? Mind telling me now?”

Standing at the door of the guards’ office was a handsomely built man, whose voice ring with authority and grace. His presence alone adds weight to the already tense air at the moment. The guards outside were still bowing to the man when Apollo turned and saw him.

Immediately he lowered one knee to ground. Men behind him copied promptly.

 “Your Majesty! I apologize for my incompetence. Her Majesty Princess Lucilla has been missing from—“

“I know that already. The other news?”

“—and a body was found in the study. We still don’t know who is responsible, or if it is related to the princess. Or—“

Silence hanged in the air. Apollo slowly lifted his gaze to his liege, meeting him square in the eye.

Nobody spoke for a full minute before he continued, “—perhaps the other case hasn’t really ended yet.”

The Emperor’s curious complexion sank.

“We’ll give our utmost effort to find Her Majesty Princess, and if it is really what we think what it is, sir, then His Majesty must not remain in palace grounds any longer, for safety.”

“I understand. Take care of things here for me.”

“Certainly, sir.”

As soon as the Emperor walked out of the room, accompanied by the Guards, he left the barracks.

“Attention. Prepare for Code 14. Departure would be in 1 hour.”

Despite the situation, Apollo managed to sound collected in his order.

So... I made a thing.

It was a cold and dark winter night. Pine trees lined up imperfectly in a thick forest a few miles from the borders of the nearest city wall, shouldering some bit of snow that had fallen just hours ago. There was no obvious movement in the whited out landscape marked with lodges and towers, separated by stone roads interlocked in an almost perfect circular grid, with the larger ones leading to the center. The residents had fallen asleep.
Save for one desperate soul in the woods. Crunching footsteps through the thick snow could be heard if one stood close enough, but the woman was running alone in the darkness, relying on the white snow to guide her way from bumping into the trees. With each second she struggled to move her legs as fast as she could, while avoiding the main road lest she be caught. Under the ragged hood she was wearing over her clothes, her eyes were set straight forward, away from the city she was running from. If only she weren’t fleeing in great haste she could have stopped and admire the calm, albeit eerie atmosphere of the shyly gleaming snow. It goes without saying she had no time for that. Her panting and throbbing heart ringed in her ears though the dark silence.
*********************************************************************************
The royal palace on the other hand were wide awake. At least, the whole resident of the royal guards’ barracks were highly alert. Woken up by the emergency signal, all the guards swiftly prepared their gears and marched quickly to the center courtyard in a neat file. Those who were on night duty tonight were lucky not to be stripped of their much yearned rest. Despite all that their loyalty and training burned off all signs of lethargy from the guards’ faces, their own feelings notwithstanding.
“Listen up. We have a tough night on our hands. Her Majesty Princess Lucilla, possible Code 3. No signs of outside entry, though don’t lower your guards. Hound units, separate into all directions and locate her scent. Units 5 and 6 would set up a perimeter. The rest, search the city. Palace service members would search inside. Dismissed.”
Following their orders, the guards marched to their posts in great urgency. A while later a perimeter was set, the hounds sent racing across the palace compounds, doors were knocked. What was a completely silent night was jolted awake with the commotion from the palace. It was a good half an hour before a report came in.
“This is Hound 5. We found footsteps in the snow outside the North wing, leading westward. Apparently Her Majesty was alone. Should we call for backup?”
Listening to the voice from his pocket watch, the head guard nodded in satisfaction.
 “Affirmative. All units, head westward. I’ll contact the West wall guards,” he replied to his pocket watch. His head turned east, looking longingly into the distance.
*********************************************************************************
About 20 miles east, a horse carriage raced through the snow away from the city. Despite the settling snow, the wheels slid along perfectly through the rough terrain. Inside were two women, one appearing younger and meeker than the other. The much burlier one, half-crouched with her right hand on her sheathed sword and one hand covering the smaller with a thick robe. Her eyes were wide open, almost like a cat’s, searching for light in the night while the horses faithfully dragged the carriage across the long road east. Underneath the robe, the younger woman shivered.
“I’m sorry for the cold, but please hold out for a little while longer.” The voice was firm, fitting the owner’s strong build, but surprisingly gentle.
“Do not worry Altea. I am fine. I am also sorry for involving you in this.”
“I am forever in Your Majesty’s service, Princess Lucilla. Please do not apologize for your rightful request upon me.”

Keep your eyes open. Part 1 (working title)

It was around 8.00 pm. The moon in the sky shone brightly despite the noisy city lights, leaving only the lights from the stars remained masked.

A man, tall but not quite slender, was smoking a cigarette on top of the city's tallest building. Dressed in all white but his black boots, people could easily had him mistaken for a ghost if for once they tried focusing up the roof. People seemed to like this urban mystery stories; creepypastas and what not. But he is real. Even people tried to see him, it wasn't that they could have easily spotted him.
Sparkling lights from bars,shops and Christmas decorations pretty much blinded everyone on street level. The fact that everyone was also preoccupied with their phones or walking partners wasn't really making anyone looking up; a sad thing, given that the moon was extraordinarily pretty this particular night.

Stroking his chrome beard, he puffed out smoke that slowly dispersed in front of him. He took another puff, and turned to face backwards from his panoramic view of the city.

'Oh, didn't see you there.'

He said this while exhaling the thick smoke , making it looked like the words he spoke were spelled out by the reeking gas.

'You must be the new kid. We've got ourselves a pretty easy job today, lucky you.'

Turning again to face the whole city behind him, he pointed with his lips,
'Do you see the man in charcoal suit over there? No? Oh, that's right. Silly me. You just woke up today, did you not? It takes a little while to get used to the Vision.'

All these made no sense to the hearing ears. He motioned you to come closer, and handed you a long, black, metal sniper rifle, much to your surprise; you didn't see him carrying it around before.

'For now I shall be the Watcher and you, the Executor. Your job is to pull the trigger when I say so. Clear? Okay, hold this steady, aim; don't worry you couldn't see him clear for now; I'll tell you what to do. Okay? Look through the scope really careful. Don't wanna mess this up now.'

Through the narrow tube you could barely see a sea of humans streaming in and out buildings and crosswalks. It was Christmas Eve, and you are about to shoot a stranger. In this peak time, in front of of this many people. Fortunately not in broad daylight.

'...a few degrees left, slightly up, and... see him now? The guy's sitting at the bus stop. Now, all that is left to do is to finish this. But, wait, we need to make this look a little more like an unfortunate "accident". I'll make the call.'

The target, still in his thirties, jet black short cropped hair, and a solid jaw, started to search for his cellphone in his black leather briefcase. He found it, and put it up to his left ear. From your position you could not make the most of his complexion, might be because of the light, but you somehow managed to see him mouthing 'Hello?' Of course, there was not any answer.

He had no idea what was coming for him.

'Now.'

You pulled the trigger. Heavier than you thought. The silenced scope gave almost no sound aside from the slight whip from air sliced with a thin blade.

A man fell down from his seat in the bus stop with a loud bang accompanying him. The phone he was holding exploded in his face, now bloody and shattered beyond recognition. The police would need his documents to identify him now. People ducked and moved away, screaming and shouting.
You watch all this from the magnificent view from the 37-story Sendai Trust City tower.

Your first job: completed. Shiver raced down your spine.

Was it because of excitement? Perhaps. Fear? Probably.

The cheery and innocuous old man voice your partner spoke all his dialog in while showing inhuman expressions on his face? Most likely the reason.

Grass is always greener on the other side.

For all that have been patiently following blog updates, congratulations for having an assertive personality. You guys made it through these hard times, despite blogs are going out of trend for young people, because people are more into Instagram now. Well, they said a picture speaks a thousand words, didn't they?

  Now I'm in my third week of holidays, as usual, holidays are stuffed with three times more homework than we usually have. Those teachers are so good in ensuring their students doesn't get any break from their books. I'm so damn proud of them. I have found no other group of people who are so dedicated in troubling our supposed-to-be carefree youth life. I've never been a diligent one since I entered high school and started to discover the beauty of procrastinating and the miracle of an all-nighter before an exam, so I really hate this homework thing, as we all do.

  As I spat out complaints and my disapproval of such a barbaric method to punish students, I realized that I'm not the only one with the same problem. Most teenagers my age face this kind of inner conflict everyday :   Games or that homework-handout-that-looks-like-a-volume-of-encyclopedia-but-somehow-still-have-HANDOUT-written-on-it. Insensible. Normal students, will yield to temptations and put the latter aside until an undecided date.

  Nevertheless, claims of AAJ being the busiest course still fills my Twitter timeline almost every time I surf the Net. Well, we do have a lot of insane homework and we do study from 8 to 6 daily, but tell me how that makes us different from other students. Argh. I really hate it when my rants are college-oriented, but I think this is better than some kids my age writing about politics and claim they know all about this country. Man, don't be an adult. We should talk about games, football, anime, cars, girls (?) like a normal pre-adult should.

  Okay, returning to the topic, what am I trying to point here is, I know kanji lessons are sleep-inducing and physics homework is nauseating, but please don't forget what we have here is just a little bit. Even matriculation students have it rougher than us. Imagine same class hours, with even tougher subjects and their future at stake. Sometimes I feel I don't deserve to complain. So I think all of us shouldn't too. All we have to do now is seize this chance and don't let those people who are counting on us down. Prove that despite our syllabus is quite backwards compared to other courses, we can still be on par with those from elite western universities after graduation,well, I know we can do it better.

  But I guess that's how humans are. No matter how much we have at possession, we always have that feeling of lacking something. We always feel people are way luckier than ourselves. We never stop to think and count our blessings but we always curse our fate for things we don't have. Competitiveness is a good trait but, isn't trying to have everything called greedy? Let's scrutinize our lives, and we may find something which is always there for us but we are so busy looking at the other side, we forget the grass is still growing at our own lawn.

  When we feel our lawn is not green enough,  remember that some people have no other than dirt and dried leaves.

A year's always a year. The difference is how long it seems to be.

Hi there. It's the end of the year again. Most of things happened quite the same like the years I've been through before, save for the fact that I would be 19 soon, after barely turning 18 in this month. (yeah, I'm one of those December kids.) This year's had been so hectic and rapid, frankly speaking, I haven't spent a year as fast as this before. Well, time sure flies, but, somehow, I think this year's experience is less valuable and memorable than those in years before this.

  It's surprising to find out that 365 days are always 365 days;but sometimes the moment seems too short or too long for us to live through. For me, 2012 is the shortest year of my life.  Though this year's supposed to be a turning point for me, but I keep feeling listless, unsatisfied with what I've done this year. So many things changed my life, but so much yet to be changed.

  Maybe it's because I miss my high school years too much that I keep feeling like this. It felt like I've just left school despite it's been a whole year since. The sense of belonging should have been long gone, but somehow, it won't leave.

  I think that's why most mangas tell stories set in high school. That is the only place where we grow through two stages of life: the end of childhood and adolescence. That is the place where most people found their first love, first learned the value of friendship, and first found the joy of being young. After that, growing up is boring and busy. More responsibility and issues to deal with, yet so little time given. I guess this is what means to grow up. Now I begin to understand why my parents, my teachers and so many people tell me to do this and that: they have been through the same things before and they made the same mistakes, but they want us to learn from it before we even do such things. Unfortunately sometimes life doesn't work that way.

  2013 is coming soon. Before that year unveils its curtains for us, let's scrutinize ourselves, look for the missing parts in our hearts, and fill them in next year. Or at least try filling them up.

   I wish for a time where I can finally celebrate a new year filled with afterglow of learning new life lessons. I hope years after this would be the ones teaching me the most.

  Have a blessed new year, everyone!

Newton's Third Law

(This is not a post about the physics law, so if you are looking for online tutorials, you have come to the wrong place.)

Assalamualaikum. Hi there. It's been a since my last post. (Okay, here we go again with the usual same header for every blog post I make) I've been through quite hectic times these past few months, and as always, I'm just too busy to write. Or maybe I'm out of ideas. Whichever it is, my monthly update is one day overdue, I wrote no posts for November, and now we are back to December already. How fast time flies by, it's already been a year since I finished high school.

  Well, that's how things work don't they? They say time speeds up rapidly when we are having fun, so I can pretty sum up this year as a very good year with so much exciting things happening to me, and my favorite fellow blogger, Aliya Najiha has finally updated her blog! Hurrah! Kinda miss your posts , Kak Aliya. Haha. (Not sure if she will be reading this, but anyways)

  So on this day I spent some time with my father, he came to KL for a meeting and I take this chance to hang out(?) with my dad, and decided to miss the Jogathon at my college this morning. Felt a little bit "zannen" because it seems people were having so much fun and some of my friends and "sensei"s won places in the Jogathon, beating PASUM. Oh yeaaah. Hahaha. (No offense PASUMians) Then we went to mall, having coffees and talked quite a bit, when I voiced out some of my desires of having new gadgets. But the gadgets are now overpriced, and I gave up of looking for new things to add up to my collections. I was actually looking for a good phone to help with my Kanji studies, but I don't want an entire new phone, because I know I won't be using most of the functions anyway. (I know I'm pretty stingy at times like these)

 I told him I decided to give up,and he said to me: " I will buy it for you, but ask yourself first, do you really need this? If your studies plunged down drastically despite your maximum efforts, and you think this might help, then go and buy one.But seeing how are things going now, without these things, you still managed to cope well. When I was your age, my lecturer also discouraged me from using technologies, because soon too much technologies will turn you to a machine slave. See how cashiers today, when you ask them 'How much is it?' '2 ringgits' , then you pay 10 ringgits, they still need a calculator to calculate the change."

 The thought hit me, "Humans are capable to do extraordinary things when they have nothing to help." The tougher things get, the harder humans hit back. To me, it seems analogical to the Newton's third law. "Every action has an equal reaction."  I pondered a little bit, and let's try to think together, how on Earth, past scholars succeeded in pioneering breakthroughs without much assistance from machines? I sum up the answers as their perseverance and the condition they were in provided them a catalyst to reach greater heights and elevate their academic threshold to a greater limit. The harder it got for them to search for answers, the greater they became.

 To all my readers out there, don't ever ever give up when you are trapped in a cul-de-sac, when there is no way but only to turn back, but instead break through the walls, smash the obstacles, and spread your wings.

"A lethal sword will render useless in the hands of a blind man, an innoceint pen will be deadly in the hands of an assassin."

Till next post!

Time tides.

I love to write. So much, that I felt some kind of disappointment when I knew that my course's English examination won't include compositions. It's quite terrifying to realise that having no compostion exams will decrease my chance of writing even further, as I'm  not the type to keep diaries. Even right now, I taking a lot more time to spell some extra long words and translating whatever in my mind into English than I used to in my high school years. Sad, isn't it?

  Then there's this blog, 1994's. It's a blog authored by various bloggers, and all of them write exceptionally well. How I wish I were in their group. Learning another language and struggling with my subjects seems like to deteriorate my English capability to a serious athropy now. Not blaming the situation, but now I really miss those days where studies were not much of a problem.How much time had changed my life.







It's October now.A month since the last entry. It's fascinating how time flies rapidly without even us noticing, but it leaves a lot of evocative impacts on our lives. Illustrating this, think back of the time when you guys meet or video chat with your old buddies whom you hadn't met in a long time. "Wah, dah kurus laaa..." "Eh, apsal kau dah gelap hah?" " Iiiiish,, makin lawa la aku tengok kau ni!" must be among the comments,right? Of course, "Tak ubah langsung!" are heard, but some things must've changed right? That happens to me, a lot of things changed. My schedule, nap-time, the way I spend weekends, and of course, the people that surrounds me. Cest la vie, mon ami. We have to cope with the ever-altering surroundings or otherwise, we might stay unimproved. Changes and challenges always improve something right?

  That said, let us take every challenge and change in our lives as a path, a path to cross to the other side of our lives which haven't been discovered yet.

" Experiences are not measured by the amount of time one had lived, but how many challenges one had braved."

Till next time, mata nee, minna!