Torrance was certain that the girl, Emily, was standing at the very spot where he was now staring at before the lights went out. He had greeted her, and she was speaking to him in return, asking about the computer equipment that they had in school. The spot was now vacant, but her three friends were still in the same positions relative to Emily. All three were naturally rattled by the blackout and had linked arms with each other in panic, and looked at each other with relief when the room was illuminated again. But none of them behaved like they were missing a fourth member. From what Torrance could deduce, they were behaving like a trio. And yet their standing positions indicated otherwise. Then Torrance noticed something else; the tumbler he saw Emily drinking from was now held by one of her friends, a very fair, almost pasty-looking slim blonde.
OOC:
Success on Investigation, deductively Torrance is convinced Emily was definitely present, and now no longer there. The logical conclusion is that it wasn't a trick of the mind, but she physically vanished from the spot. PhoenixScientist earlier you offered to attempt an Arete roll but we didn't get round to that. Here's a good moment to do it, would you like to do that roll in relation to Time? Don't forget to describe some kind of focus, and whether it's coincidental or vulgar.
Kyle could hear the Photography Club members collectively groan when they discovered that all their cameras had malfunctioned at the same time. Nearer to him, at the booth table, he spied Zane’s phone sparking too, but more importantly, he thought he saw a strange expression on Zane’s face before Zane quickly tried to recover his composure. What was his classmate bothered about? Kyle looked to his own phone to discover that for some reason it was doing a fresh restart, even though he hadn’t touched the on/off button.
He was so used to interfacing with his phone for all sorts of things that merely holding it, even in its rebooting stage, seemed to extend his senses. Not his five physical senses, but something else altogether. He found himself able to ‘track’, without relying on his tracker api. He could ‘see’ the route Emily took to enter the hall, and could trace it out through the door. If he wanted, he could follow it. What was inexplicable was that there was no route exiting the hall. The track ended where Emily formerly stood.
OOC:
The skill roll failed, so while Kyle notices a couple of things around him, such as Zane, he cannot deduce why things are what they are. The magic roll is a success though. Kyle can see the ‘energy’ trail left by Emily when she entered.
Myra flipped out her notebook and quickly sketched all the symbols; they seemed to vanish from her memory all too quickly as if they were not meant to exist. When the lights came back on, the walls of the multi-purpose hall were as normal, there was no sign of any of the glowing sigils, only the ordinary ones of the various school crests. As she sketched, unwittingly she ended up drawing a set of nine shapes in relation to each other. On a different page she drew a snake in angular form, encapsulating a square, triangle and circle all at the same time. Lastly, she traced a complex diagram which could only be described as some sort of broken circle. There was one more image, but somehow she was unable to draw that.
When she looked back up to the walls as the chaos began to settle a little with the arrival of some teachers to help take charge, she saw Vice-Principal Marston standing nearer the stage, ready to tell the students to keep calm. She saw him looking at the same direction as she was, at the walls. And then Myra felt as if he knew that she was looking at the walls.
OOC:
Runekyndig, in your case let's go with two ability checks rather than the magic roll for now. Success on the Awareness, but a fail on Art. That said, I interpret that as Myra still being able to draw them, but with inaccuracy. But because Myra has the Library background, she could go do research once she gets to her library (either at home, or I actually think it's cleverer if we think of her as very skilled in using the school library), let’s assume Myra might already have read something relevant. Roll Int+Library for what the symbols mean, the more successes, the more symbols she knows. The Perception success lets Myra see Marston seeing her. He knows something!
With everything happening about her, Wren struck the keys by instinct. Playing the piano was one of the ways that would soothe her, and now it served to ground her from the even more overwhelming resonance that seemed to flood the entire hall. Perhaps the blackout was a representation of that overarching sense that smothered everyone which Wren pickedup on. The overwhelm drowned out any perception of the empty presence where Emily was. It was as if Wren had sat on the bench by herself. Wren could not tell where Emily might be, or if she was ever there. But the echoing of the wrong note said it all, something was discordant.
She let the discordance reverberate in her head, and tried to sense of there were other anomalies of the same nature. Off the stage to the near right where the Editorial Wing’s booth was, she could see Daniela crying and struggling to keep her tears in. To the far left, some people near the row of math / science / tech / bio clubs gave that same vibe, but she was a bit too far to say exactly who they were. There were fellow classmates there: Kyle, Luna, Myra, Sven. Did they also feel as affected?
OOC:
Barely missed on that Awareness roll, but I’m okay with piano playing as coincidental for Prime, so I’ve described the success accordingly.
Jonathan’s vision wasn’t ‘visual’, not in the sense that he saw a mass of corpses or dead bodies. He understood full well realism was only one genre of art. What he sensed was fuzzy, impressionistic. Or perhaps even expressionistic, swathes of sensory death in the fatalistic manner of the fact that everyone dies sooner or later. That was what made the three contrasts stick out. One was himself, something about dying to his old self, and the manifest presence of a newer self, an ‘avatar’ of sorts. The second was the vanished girl. Was she already dead, and her presence an illusion? If so then illusions did not leave death impressions. Something metaphysical perhaps.
The third was the impression of a name that Sabrina mentioned earlier in the auditorium. Alex Vance, their classmate. Alex did not report to school today, and his closest friends Raven and Sabrina herself were concernedly talking about him earlier. Jonathan associated death with him, even though it was impossible that Alex was physically present in the hall.
OOC:
At diff 7, the Awareness check is a fail. Granting a basic Entropy roll (Entropy 2 would be diff 5, Entropy 1 would be diff 4, coincidental) let’s call that a narrow success. I took the opportunity to hint at your high level in Avatar. The brief reference to Alex can be found in the second post of this thread.
Down at the gym, Joe and Minsoo both stood at the athletics booth. The three girls who came with Emily still stood relatively near them. But of Emily there was no sign.
Joe's thoughts immediately went to what he had learnt about the mind and illusion. This was something he might process better in consultation with his inner guide, or when he had the opportunity to go into what he thought of as his own dreamscape. For now, it did seem to him like his sensory perception might have deceived him as it did everyone, but the fact that he was able to think so meant his mind was not as deceived as everyone else's. Perhaps instead of seeing with his eyes, he ought to try seeing in a different way.
Minsoo was bewildered at the girls’ reply.
"Hm? What friend? We’re still here!" Came the alarmed reply from the pasty-faced slim girl of the three. The trio were equally puzzled by Minsoo’s question, and as far as she could tell, they weren’t trying to pull her leg; their body language relative to each other indicated that the three of them had come together; here was no fourth from the way they stood side by side, and apart from the fact that they were agitated by the blackout, nothing seemed untoward about them.
Her phone was wonky too. Even after she had pressed send, the message to her class chat remained undelivered for a good while. Whatever had happened seemed to have affected the telco network. Did the multi-purpose hall also suffer the blackout?
OOC:
ThetaSigma, I'm leveraging the previous failed roll to explain this new roll's success. He thinks everyone was deceived by Emily's appearance but he wasn't part of collective deception. Instead, his Occult knowledge tells him to think out of the box to seek a supernatural explanation instead. Now would be a good time to try a Life roll, to check if Emily is 'alive', or a 'living being' and not an illusion. Don't forget to describe some kind of focus, and whether it's coincidental or vulgar.
KCC, you can still pursue the line of questioning regarding the missing girl, roll something suggested earlier depending on what direction you’d like to take it. Or, if you want to think harder about the vision, then I’ll need a magick roll instead, something Correspondence-related could tell you where it might be, Mind may reveal whether it’s a living thing or not, and so on depending on what you’re trying to figure out regarding the spooky thing.
