Unpleasant Company
 “Here’s the money. Thank you for your hospitability,” said Maya as she left Ten Stars with her backpack once again on her shoulders and her determination a glint in her eyes.  Shouldn’t be too hard to find out where this lunatic lives, she assured herself. After all, the village of Madagascar was just the size of a large town.
Sure enough, Maya found herself staring at a wasted hut only ten minutes later. It wasn’t in good shape either, what with its foundations crumbling and sinking into a mud pit.
An eerie, stale air emanated from the dwelling (if it could be called even that), and polluted the few feet or so around it. Let’s put it this way, classifying it as “unpleasant” would be quite the understatement.
Maya walked over to the planks that were the main entrance and leaned against them. They wouldn’t budge. She circled the hut, looking for a window, but there was none. So she went back to the door and tried to open it once more. This time it was effortless.
After looking inside Maya raised her eyebrows and blinked. “Charming,” she mumbled.
The sight that greeted her would have probably made the usual human scream:
Lined up along the hut’s circular walls were the chained corpses of about twenty women. Their skin was dark as ebony and their teeth (for they were seemed to have died smiling) quite the contrast. One long, ornate, knitted shawl was draped over each pair of slumped shoulders, and ivory daggers had been roughly shoved into their hearts. Remnants of the crime rested at their feet—blood and feathers (of which crowns rested on each of their shaved heads).
Maya strode around the small room, searching. No, nothing useful around here, it seemed. Unless the daggers were? Maya walked over to the closest body and pulled. Little drops of liquid dripped from its tip. It wasn’t blood though. Well isn’t that odd, Maya thought with a slight shake of her head. The substance, whatever it was Maya had not the slightest clue, was a striking green, fluorescent. Was it some poison the blade had been covered in to ensure the victim’s death? Or had the author of such macabre spectacle stored the liquid into the corpses for a specific purpose?
Well, Maya thought with a shrug,what better way to find out what this is than tasting it?  She brushed her index finger along the blade, but didn’t feel any of the substance, even though she could see it flowing all around her finger.
“Must be some sort of liquid-look-a-like gas?” She muttered. So instead, she started leaning over the blade to breathe in the supposed gas. She was five inches or so from the blade when…she heard a giggle.
“Breathe that stuff in and you die for sure,” said a high-pitched, painfully familiar voice from behind her.
“GABRIELLE!” Maya shrieked, her fist curling around the dagger. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING HERE?”
“ Uh, stalking you…obviously.” She said with a sweet smile. “Oh, by the way, a dagger is way too dangerous to be pointing at your darling sister, drop that right now.” And since Maya knew that if she killed her sister that moment she would get in federal trouble, and maybe regret it, later on, she did. She dagger clattered noisily to the floor.
“Anyway, so like, that friend of yours—B”
“Gabrielle,” Maya said, taking the deep breaths her anger-management class instructor had taught her, “You probably think that stalking people, even if they are your sister, is normal. It is not and I want an enlightening response to this: What on Earth are you stalking me for?”
“Ah well, you see, when I got home from school and didn’t find you there, I figured you’d be up to one of those little projects of yours. And I thought, who needs school, right? I mean, come on, those supposed teachers talk complete baloney. ‘If pi to the second is equal to a to the third, then what is a to the third plus five?’ Absolute boredom I tell you, a third grader could solve that. Oh, sorry, getting off topic here. Anyway, so like yeah, after I didn’t find you I decided to stalk you, etcetera etcetera, even you can figure out the rest. And so now I’m here.” Gabrielle said all of this at a speed that would put a racecar to shame, and with the same expression one uses when speaking to a toddler.
“Uh huh. Ok little know-it-all, then—”
“Maya, Maya, how many times do I have to tell you this: I am not a know-it-all, I’m a know-it-most. Seriously, whoever invented the expression was obviously narrow-minded; nobody knows absolutely everything. 
“Ever heard the word figurative, genius?” Maya growled.
“Hey, hey, don’t get smart on me.”
“If I got smart on you, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Mmhmm, right, right, you betcha.” Gabrielle winked, “now let me tell you exactly what happened here.”
 
Five minutes later, after catching up on rather important things (Buna called, Lacey and Keenan are worried sick about you, we ran out of milk cartons), the sisters sat down in the center of the hut, as far away from the cadavers and each other as possible. (A complex thing to accomplish let me tell you.)
Gabrielle was basically a younger, yet taller version of her sister. The only big difference between them was their overall style.
 Thirteen-year-old Gabrielle was slim, with long, wavy black hair, ironed and brushed daily to result in a fashionable, long bob, with one bang to the side and spiky red tips. Her eyes were deep, morpho blue, and her skin alabaster pale. She wore a black shirt, black jeans, and (oh-what-a-surprise) black converse high-tops.
Her sister, in contrast, always pulled her long black hair into a tight bun, ballerina style, not one hair out of place. Her eyes were the same as her sister’s, except in dim light, when they seemed to change into a brighter hue. Was she pallid, as well? Yes. She wore dark jeans, with a light flannel shirt and her favorite, ever-lasting hiking boots.
“So?” Spoke Gabrielle finally, “may I begin?”
“Go ahead Sherlock, amaze me.” Maya replied with a roll of her eyes.
“Ok. So like I came here after I heard you talking about that lunatic, blimey, he’s scarier than this place. Anyway, so I walked in and like yeah, I kinda almost yelled my head off, I mean, who wouldn’t, besides you obviously, you’re the most insensitive person I know. Oh yeah, and so I walked around, studying the place and the women, of course. My conclusion is that this is some kind of ritual..?” She drifted off with a thoughtful frown of her face. “Anyway, so when you pulled out the dagger, I immediately noticed the giquid, and—”
“Giquid. Creative are we?” Maya interrupted with a quizzical expression. “Anyway, sorry, go on.”
“And well I have never studied or seen these kind of chemical reactions before, but I figured two things: One, the giquid is dangerous, and very valuable, why else would someone have taken the time to store it that way? Two, whomever did wanted others to find out about it, or else the crime seen wouldn’t be so conspicuous. So basically, I think you’re—we’re—onto something here.”
“Wait. But The Lunatic (it had been cruelly decided that would be his name henceforward) said that he kept important items not precious substances…”
“Oh, about that,” Gabrielle replied with a tiresome shake of her head, “you got the wrong hut. The man’s house is right next to the hotel. Now seriously, is the whole Madagascar thing turning you stupider?” 
Maya glared, “shut up and go to sleep.”
“Maya, for sleeping the amount you do, you don’t really make it up with intelligence. I say we poke around a bit more!” Gabrielle grinned, “not scared are you?”
“Kind of. I mean, these are corpses after all.”
“Wuss. Come on.”