The Dead Pixel Society

© 2026 Zoe Taylor

P.E. is bad enough, but at Clarity Prep, there's also the joy of the colorfully labelled New Experience Day, and today's lesson is Fencing, or as Lewis/Aria thinks of it, 'being a lopsided tripod with a sword.' Still, she manages to make a new friend in a senior fencing student and further the goal of repairing The Beige Beast in the process. And soon she'll get to actually see what the girls' dorms actually look like, too. En garde!

P.E. was already bad enough, but today was what the coach colorfully referred to as ‘New Experience Day’ in which students were given to experiencing a new sport the hard way. Last week, it had at least been basketball. Any numbskull could learn to dribble a basket in a few minutes and shoot hoops. Horse was actually pretty fun even though Lewis lost handily to his more athletic ‘cohort’; he still hated that damn word.

But today was a whole other animal. The Octopus on Mars had become a penguin. At least, he felt like a penguin in his borrowed fencing kit, knickers and heavy coat, and the plastron felt completely alien.

“The secret to fencing,” Coach Theresa Enders said, “Isn’t to overpower your opponent. Strength is an advantage, but it’s only one KIND of advantage. You, Chambers,” she said, pointing right at Lewis with her steel foil. “Come over here.”

Lewis gulped as he stepped forward.

“You don’t lift weights do you kid?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” Lewis answered, getting a giggle from his fellow freshmen.

“Yeah I didn’t think so, but I had to be sure you weren’t hiding bulging pecs under that coat,” she teased “Don’t sweat it though. Some of the best fencers in history looked like they’d crash under a stiff breeze,” Coach Enders said, her voice carrying in the high-ceilinged gym. Lewis couldn't help admiring the acoustics in here. “Masks on your hips for now. Everyone find a line on the floor, feet in an 'L' shape with your lead foot pointing at me, back foot at a ninety-degree angle.”

Lewis looked down at his feet. He felt less like an athlete and more like a poorly constructed tripod. How did anyone actually compete like this? Or, you know, move? If he tried to lunge he’d just faceplant, he just knew it.

“Now, bend your knees. Lower your center of gravity,” she commanded, walking through the rows. She tapped the back of Lewis’s knee with the flat of her blade. “Lower. If your thighs aren't burning, you’re doing it wrong.”
Lewis' thighs were burning for a very different reason. Aria had spent thirty minutes kneeling while Heather ran fresh cables to replace the ones that, for whatever reason, had just decided they wanted to clock out. She longed for the safety of the art room, the Raven's Nest again, now more than ever.

“Fencing, ladies and gentlemen, is physical chess, played at the speed of a car crash. In fencing we have right of way. That means,” she lunged at a student who flinched and toppled over backwards. Thankfully it wasn’t Lewis. She reached her left hand out to help them get up again. “You alright?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” the girl said and giggled.

“If I lunge at you like that, you can’t just try and hit me back. You have to parry the strike first to earn your chance.

“Arm out,” she said as she stepped toward Lewis. “You’re not punching with it. Think of it like you’re holding a laser pointer instead. The weight is in the hilt. The tip is where you want the laser pointer to go. You want the point to find the target, in this case the torso.”

Lewis extended his arm as she instructed. The hilt felt heavy, but the tip did feel strangely floaty, almost exactly like trying to guide a laser pointer.

“What’s so funny, Chambers?” Enders asked, grinning as if she knew what the punchline was going to be.

“Sorry Coach,” Lewis said. “It’s just I suddenly get why Luke had so much trouble with the lightsaber.”

“Exactly!” Coach Enders laughed. “That’s exactly how a lightsaber would feel in your hands, only you can’t wield a foil with two hands. You have to rely on your wrist dexterity instead. It’s a game of physics, not strength.”

She walked in front of Lewis with his blade out, pressing hers against his. “If I push the tip of my blade against yours, I win,” she said, and easily pushed his foil aside. “The hilt is the strong, the forte. The tip is the weak, the foible. Use your forte to push their foible.”

“Now, let’s see if you can move those clodhoppers,” she said, adding, “That’s what us old farts call your feet,” she added, getting another giggle from the class, as she walked around, inspecting other students, now that she had thoroughly schooled Lewis.

An older girl in full fencing kit was casually leaning against a column and watching the freshmen with an amused, but not mean, smile on her face, her dark brown skin almost radiant in the fluorescent light and her long, chestnut hair in a flawless French braid against her white gear. Lewis tried not to look at her. After all, she wasn’t staring at him, just watching the class as a whole.

“Alright, who’s ready for a real demonstration?” Enders clipped, a predatory grin on her face for the first time all morning. “Ah, let’s see, who should I pick on...”

Without saying a word the girl stepped closer, and Lewis now realized her fencing mask was no mere club mask, no borrowed thing a thousand others had worn in the last six months, but a sleek and professional mask with matte black mesh to his battle worn, battered silver. The bib, rather than being black, was an almost fluorescent blue, and even her foil looked expensive to his clueless, novice’s eye, its sharp tip only guarded by a thin rubber plug.

He gulped as he felt Enders’ hand on his shoulder. “Well since there aren’t any volunteers, how about you, Luke? Care to try your luck with the Force?”

“I’m willing to try,” Lewis answered.

The girl flashed him a very brief smile before drawing her mask down. “I’ll go easy on you this time, freshman. Salute,” she said. It wasn’t a command. It was an instruction. She drew up her foil to about where her chin would be, flawlessly vertical. “Like this. You always salute your opponent before a match, and your referee and director afterward, before you salute the audience.”

Lewis tried to draw up his foil. It suddenly felt like a ten ton weight in his gloved hand, but he managed to hold it steady enough.

“Good,” she said. “Just like that.”

She dropped her sword into a low ready stance.

“En garde!” Coach Enders called. Lewis fell into the en garde position, but the girl didn’t lunge for him. She was waiting, giving him the chance to make the first move. He took a nervous step forward, and before he even knew what was happening, she had made a small, circular motion with her wrist and he found himself sailing past her. She tapped him on the back with her foil. “One, two, three,” she counted, tapping rhythmically on his back.

“Again,” Enders commanded. They reset, and Lewis tried again, but no matter what he did, the girl either seemed to just no longer be there, or she predicted his movement and countered it as soon as he made it. At the end of a full minute, she blew her whistle.

“Salute!” she barked. Lewis got back to his mark and saluted the girl, and then turned to salute Coach Enders. When they pulled off their masks, the girl had a different kind of glow, mild exertion and sweat. Lewis looked like he was going to collapse, by contrast.

“This is depressing me,” an older boy with shoulders like a linebacker - and he probably was a linebacker, now Lewis came to think of it, grunted. “You’re holding back, Elaine. Let’s see how you handle a REAL man, huh? Give these kiddies a real demonstration!”

“If you insist, Randy,” Elaine said with a dry exasperation. She dropped her mask into place and waited for him to join her on the piste.

Randy charged, attempting to use a flesh, a technically legal move, although Randy treated it like a football tackle rather than a fencing move. Elaine didn’t flinch. She dropped, pressing her left hand against the floor, and the blade soared right over her head. As he stumbled past, she sprang back and smacked him hard in the ribs with the flat of her foil.

“Point, Elaine,” Enders said flatly.

Randy snarled at being humiliated and literally wounded. On their next pass, as their foils locked he used his left hand to shove her shoulder, trying to throw her off balance. He tried to stab her, like he genuinely wanted to run her through. Not only did she recover, she simply wasn’t where his foil was anymore. She gave him another hard thwack across his ribs in the exact same spot - not near it - exactly on it.

For the next thirty seconds, Randy flailed like a drunken Arol Flynn. Elaine moved fluidly, small, economical motions, driving him backwards with her efficiency and her precision. She executed a flick. He wanted a brawl, and Elaine was going to give it to him. No more games. She backed him all the way down the piste before she flicked his mask off, and in the same fluid motion, disarmed him, his foil flying across the gym floor. She put the very real, very sharp tip of the foil against his throat.

“If you EVER try anything like that on me or any other student again, expulsion will be the least of your problems. Are we clear?” she snapped icily. Randy’s nod was just enough not to impale himself on her foil, very real fear in his eyes as he realized Coach Enders wasn’t going to intervene on his behalf. “Get the fuck off my piste.”

The freshmen, including Lewis, couldn’t help but applaud and cheer. To them this was a high stakes high impact demonstration. They had no idea the reality, just that the really cool girl just beat the crap out of a cheating bully who tried to treat a foil like a saber.

As class dismissed and dispersed back to the lockers, Elaine remained on the piste, shadow-fencing with thin air. Lewis watched her, awestruck. If a girl like that could overcome a boy who belonged on the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive line, maybe Aria could learn to keep her voice, too? He smiled to himself and turned to head to the locker rooms to get changed.

Mercifully, Randy wasn’t there, and the other boys were too busy gossiping about Elaine, ‘The Ice Queen’, how they heard from another upperclassman that she even beat adult men to get her A ranking. Of course some of it was typical school boy bullshit, like how ‘I totally heard they were going to make a new S rank just for her!’

Lewis rolled his eyes at that one. Still, he’d noticed on his way into the gym that there was an old utility closet just off from the coaches’ offices. He slipped away and crept inside

As he was fishing around on the shelf, digging through a cardboard box marked “REECYCLE”, Elaine’s voice caused him to jump, banging his head. All she’d done was clear her throat, too. “Ow.”

“Sorry,” Elaine giggled, leaning against the doorway, still in her fencing kit but with the fancy professional mask tucked under her arm. “Did you need help finding something?”

“Just looking for a VGA cable for a really old PC I found,” he said. He pulled out an old, beige cable that looked like a rat had chewed right through it and frowned. “Like this, only... Not chewed through,” he sighed, throwing both halves back into the box.

Elaine walked closer. She reached into the box and pulled out the cable halves, inspecting them critically. “Hey, this isn’t as bad as it looks. See, there’s no corrosion on the wires. I can solder them back together if you want.”

“Really?” Lewis asked.

Elaine shrugged. “Sure.” She reached behind her and pulled out a clear, silver-wire cord from her jacket. “See this? It’s my lucky Ulman body cord. I’ve had to resolder it five or six times now, but I won’t enter a 6A tournament without it. Give me a day or two, I’ll have it ready for you. Three at the most since I’ve got an intense practice schedule. It’s just finding time that’s the hard part.”

“What can I do for you in return?” Lewis asked. “I mean that’s a lot of work just for a janky old power cable.”

“It’s like, five minutes, tops,” Elaine laughed. “Just... Don’t turn into another jackass like Randy and we’ll call it even, okay?”

Lewis smiled. “No worries there. Thank you for that amazing demonstration by the way. I know there was something deeper there, and I won’t ask you about it, but... I needed to see that today.”

“No problem. Thanks for not swooning,” Elaine laughed as she threaded her lucky cord back into her jacket, and then picked up the two chewed pieces, carrying them out with her.