30. Chloe
CHAPTER 30
CHLOE
“Come on. Pick up. Please, please please.” I had the phone jammed up against my ear as tight as it could go. Honestly, all of this might just be part of the test. Maybe this really was an accurate measure of my abilities as an omega. Maybe I should just hope for the best.
No. Fuck that shit. I had studied my ass off for the entire term. It wasn’t fair that everything that I’d worked hard on for months was about to go straight into the trashcan over something as ridiculous and stressful as this tiny machine that could fit in the palm of my hands. Someone on the Omega Curriculum Development board must have been on some kind of acid-trip when they came up with this idea for our final exam.
After a mini-eternity, as the phone rang eight times, she picked up my call.
“Momma Rain! Do you know anything about keeping Tamagotchis alive?”
I could hear Momma Rain make an undignified sound, like she was covering up a snort. “Honestly, not at all. I baked a cake celebrating when Zane’s tamagotchi battery finally died. Why would you want to keep one alive? ”
“It’s for my final. They gave me four of them. Four! They said it’s supposed to mimic taking care of a pack.”
“Oh wow. My final was totally different. I heard they changed things after the tragedy in two thousand thirteen.”
“What tragedy? Wait, isn’t that when the omega dorms got renovated?”
“Yeah, from the electrical fire caused by too many vibrators charging at the same time. They changed the final after that.” Momma Rain’s voice got muffled as she placed the phone down. I could barely make out what she was saying to one of my siblings. It was something about the ketchup being behind the pickle jar or something like that. “Sorry, so what was this about tamagotchis? They’re supposed to mimic taking care of a pack? What do little robots have to do with a pack?”
That was exactly what I was wondering. No matter how hard I tried with them, nothing ever seemed to be good enough. I was about to pull out my hair. The final was fifty percent of my entire grade. After all of the reading I had to do on testicles and multiple orgasms and every single topic they made me read about, how was it fair that my grade came down to this?
I was supposed to watch these little robotic terrors all night. If a single one of them died, I would fail my final. That would have been bad enough under normal circumstances, but the tamagotchis that they had acquired for the omega final? They were something else. They must have gone into the code and altered them somehow, because there was no way that anyone would ever buy one of these things recreationally if they were as demanding as these four had been.
“All of them are hungry, and there are electronic poops everywhere.” I was barely able to keep the hysteria out of my voice.
“Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry. That sounds awful. Did you try calling Rebel? ”
“I think she’s having a heat or something. She’s not picking up. Everyone’s number in her pack is going straight to voicemail.” I was pacing now, with the phone jammed against my ear. I frantically pressed the buttons on the screen to give the little guy a bath again. But as soon as I finished it, two other screens lit up demanding more food.
How was this supposed to teach me anything? I was lucky that I had met actual alphas before this. If I hadn’t… if I thought an actual pack of alphas was anything like this, all this test was teaching me was that I should seriously consider remaining single for the rest of my life.
“Do you have anyone who could help you out? In real life there is nothing wrong with getting support with your pack.” Momma Rain’s voice was empathetic, even as I heard the faint sound of something crashing in the kitchen and the screams of two of my siblings—was that Gunnar and Rowan?
“Yeah, actually…” That gave me an idea… a completely academically unethical idea, but I was desperate enough to take desperate measures. “I know who could help me out. Thanks Momma.”
Once I got myself to the Fanny Pack house, the guys were all in shock when they saw me. It was obvious that I had been crying. My eyes felt itchy and splotchy. I knew from experience that they must be red-rimmed along with tear streaks that would not go away, no matter how many times I tried to brush them off my face. I thought that they might have been relieved to find out that I had working, functional tear ducts, and was capable of being vulnerable with them, but the mood in the house went somber fast.
Brutus held my face gently, rage burning in his dark gaze.
“Who did this to you?” Brutus’ words promised vengeance and retribution. Someone or something had harmed his scent match and nothing would stop him until that harm had been paid out in blood.
Silently, I held up the four shitty little gadgets that had been plaguing me for hours.
All three of the guys leaned in closer, frowning.
“Are those tamagotchis? I didn’t even know that they still made those. Why do you have them?” Kain’s eyes narrowed as if I was holding a fistful of grenades.
“Wait, are these things the reason you’re upset?” Sabien poked one of them warily, as if he was afraid that the little demon egg would give him an electric shock. “Why not just throw them all in the trash?” he muttered.
My lips trembled as I tried to hold back fresh tears. In a small voice, I managed to say, “They’re for my final. I can’t throw them away.”
My scent matches blinked, staring at one another in confusion. Brutus’ gaze flicked from my face to the egg-shaped gadgets in my hand, like he was having trouble making the connection why colorful bits of tech and plastic had the power to make me cry.
“These are for your final?” Kain asked, gently getting me to explain what the hell was going on.
“I need to take care of them. It’s supposed to be like taking care of a pack, but this is too much.” I was blinking back tears, and one electronic poop away from having a complete mental breakdown. “Please. I just need to pass my final.”
“So, these things… are supposed to be us?” Brutus narrowed his eyes at the tamagotchis, clearly pissed at the little machines that had dared to distress his scent match. But was that a good thing? Did this mean that he wasn’t going to leave me with all these electronic alpha egg-monsters?
“It’s alright, darling. We’ll help you.” Kain gently pulled the little machines from my tight grasp, handing one to each member of the pack.
I thought that handling a pack of men was easier than all of these tamagotchis, but the Fanny pack seemed hell bent on proving me wrong. Hypothetically, taking care of one egg-demon should have been easier than four—if I didn’t have to micromanage the care that they were receiving from my scent matches.
Kain was button mashing and looked on the verge of having a full-on panic attack. Brutus was suspiciously calm. Clicking buttons on one of the tamagotchis without a care in the world. I narrowed my eyes, watching exactly what he was doing with it.
“Brutus! Stop disciplining it! You can’t just discipline it five times in a row.”
“Well, it needs to learn its damn lesson somehow.” Brutus was snarling, and directing all of his big-dick dominant alpha energy on the tiny screen.
“It’s a fucking robot-egg, not a submissive!” I buried my face in my hands as if that would make this nightmare just go away.
After Brutus reluctantly started to actually provide care instead of whatever kinky-shit he’d been attempting, I rushed to clean my tamagotchi for what felt like the hundredth time in the past hour.
“Stop giving it treats! He needs water!” I said to Sabien, before moving to check on Kain.
I looked up sharply at Sabien when he muttered darkly, “I’ll give you water.”
Sabien was literally holding the tamagotchi by the frail little chain, and was slowly lowering it into his cup of water. He stopped a millimeter away from dunking it under, when he noticed my scorching glare. I was mentally screaming at him, don’t you dare.
Had he really been on the cusp of drowning one fourth of my final in his drink? What the hell? I swear to all the gods, old and new, if Sabien drowned my final, I wouldn’t break up with him. I would talk the rest of the pack into helping me drown him.
Sabien sighed heavily, as he pulled the little robot out of the cup, acting as if asking him not to murder my final assignment was such a big ask. “Wait, what happens if you bring back a dead tamagotchi?”
“Oh. I’d fail. I would have to take all of my classes at the Institute over again next year.” I didn’t even look at him, as I eyed the happiness meter on my tamagotchi in concentration.
“Wait, seriously?” Kain’s voice was so tight with tension, he sounded like he’d been strangled.
“Well, yeah. Why do you think I’ve been stressing out so hard?” I frowned.
Kain, Brutus and Sabien froze, before staring at one another in shock. They gave each other grim looks, as if they had all wordlessly agreed on something.
I guess that electronic pet sitting was a lot less funny, when failure could mean a whole year of being distanced from your scent match. Besides, if I had to spend another year redoing all of my coursework… just to face these little robotic demon pet spawn again, I’d lose my mind. If one of them died, I was going to lock myself straight into an insane asylum and get myself heavily medicated, because I was not going to deal with all that again.
The tamagotchi care did not go more smoothly now that my scent matches were actually taking the task seriously.
Tension and concentration was thick in the air. All three of my scent matches were each hunched over a gadget in silence in a way that was definitely going to end with them all having back and neck pain. I thought that we were past the worst of the drama, when the silence was broken by pure unadulterated panic.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. Google it! I don’t think the screen is supposed to look like that. What the fuck is this? Is the battery low? Are you fucking kidding me? After I played with you and fed you dozens of times, YOU DON’T GET TO DIE!” Kain clenched his jaw as a vein in his forehead bulged in panic.
“It’s okay! It’s okay.” I reassured Kain, brushing soothing patterns along his arm. If that didn’t work, I was not above scent marking him to calm his ass down. “Look there. It’s just sweat on the screen. The little alien thing is fine.”
I didn’t realize that the four of us, and our needy electronic charges made it through the night, until my concentration was broken by a familiar ringtone. I put my tamagotchi down, wiping the tiredness out of my eyes before bringing my phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hey, Chloe.” Rebel’s voice was hoarse and just a bit dreamy. She didn’t even sound like she was fully out of her heat yet. “You called me? Like six times?”
“Yeah, I was panicked.” I ignored a sound in the background that I was not supposed to hear, as one of Rebel’s alphas whispered something that I immediately burned from my memory. “Rebel, how did you keep all of your tamagotchis alive?”
Rebel laughed. Straight up laughed in the face of the trauma that those egg shaped terrors caused. “You mean the final? I didn’t even try. I reset half of them the next morning.”
“You… reset them?”
“Yeah, my teacher Professor Davis was close to retiring. She barely graded anything. There was no way that she was going to manually click through hundreds of tamagotchis. She just looked at mine for like a second and saw that they were alive, before chucking them back into the box.”
I swallowed. Forcing myself to take deep breaths. There was no way something that simple would have worked for me. I hadn’t gone through all of that… for nothing?
“Chloe… you okay? ”
“I’ll call you back,” I managed to mutter. I carefully placed my phone down without shattering it. I didn’t make eye contact with the alphas who were all lying exhausted, and the stupid pile of happy tamagotchis in the center of their kitchen table.
I walked to grab a pillow from the sofa, grabbing it carefully. I dug my face into the soft fabric and screamed into it as loud as I could.