[Pre-Fall] Chapter 0: Re-Orientation

Myra retreats to the library on campus. She wants to look up those symbols she saw in her vision - she had seen them before, but where?
This was also a chance for Cass to find out if she had something to say. Things were getting weird, and secrets were kept.

Time to get back into the loop.

Kyle pauses as he realizes there are other means he can use to check on things They're just not entirely legal and possibly questionable ethically. Still it is clear something is going on and the school administration is either part of it, complicit, or being manipulated. Finding an out of the way spot he can keep an eye on Zane since he seems to have noticed someth9ing. Sliding down to to the ground he pulls out his laptop and starts bringing up several terminal windows and launching several commands and to the school network and ties into their systems for some extra computational power to start gathering information. Several queries are kicked off, including gathering system logs, those are time stamped and people often overlook them, access to the school security recordings, and then a bit more delicately he tries to see if he can isolate Zane's phone using the network and his own expanding senses, to access it as well to see it's recent activity to find out what Zane was reacting to.

Jove: That Emily girl was also in the gym at the running club stall when the lights went out. When they came back on she was gone and her three friends hadn’t missed her. IDK WTF happened, but that’s what I saw…
Joe carefully notes exactly where he’s standing- he wants to be able to find this exact spot again, and he knows that any mark is likely to be cleaned up by next day. He has a few thoughts, but this isn’t a good time to explore them just here. ‘Leave everything and just go’ sounds like the staff want to conduct an investigation of their own, no doubt once the kids are all out of the way.

Joe's ominous observation had a ring of truth to it; it did feel like they wanted to shoo everyone away to secure the venue. In fact, he noticed that Mordecai the caretaker, and the school admin manager (whose name he never found out) had arrived, presumably to start locking up. Would he still remember everything that happened here, and exactly where it happened?

Joe’s efforts go as far as the patterning of the floor surface, and the exact view at the windows; in a gym, there are probably several sets of pitch markings as well…

Minsoo allows herself to be herded out of the gymnasium with the rest of the students. Being near the end of her school career was just that… near, and so the girl still had to follow directions, even if she was given an extra bit of leeway.

All the while she’s filing outside, Minsoo can’t help but try to figure out some suitable location for the entity. Images of the school buildings flit through her mind, even as she decides it’s just about time to head home for the day.

Well, for most of the day. Once she told the others about what she had felt, she knew they’d try to get back here after hours to investigate.

>>>Being herded out of what felt to him like a 'crime scene' didn't exactly sit well with Jonathan. It felt like a cover-up, even if the thing being covered up wasn't even fully known. Yet, anyway... There were secrets here and the fact that there were people whom he and his classmates were supposed to trust behind keeping those secrets hidden wasn't exactly a new feeling for him, this secret I'm particular just felt different. More important, bigger, deeper somehow.
>>>Some of the others in his class had more answers, or at least different clues, than he did. Tomorrow he'd start asking questions.

Kyle thought he had enough time to log in to his laptop to see if he could identify anomalies through the digital network. As a senior member of the robotics and computing club, he already had access to one of the virtual servers the club was assigned to so that they could have more processing power and bandwidth to do their programming assignments and their research. Of course such computational power was not meant for personal use: the naughtiest things students have done on the server largely involved hosting a local massive multiplayer game, and rendering porn to be more realistic.

What Kyle was doing was neither. He wanted to see if their server could be used to access some of the other school-linked computers, but he was sensible enough to only skim the surface for now, by checking only system logs. At the same time, he bent his will to a few command prompts, using the same inexplicable intuition he employed earlier, to see if he could connect to Zane's phone. Looking for Zane's phone required searching for other devices and identifying it correctly. It seemed to Kyle that he could figure out which one it was fairly quickly, and was optimistic that he could have a peek inside.

He barely got to mucking about before Chase reached the part of the hall where he was and began to shoo the senior students out of the hall. Kyle compiled, so as not to seem suspicious, and also because Zane also followed Chase's instructions to leave. As Kyle was flipping his laptop closed he could see some of the school system logs; the logs between 2.58 and 3.00pm appeared to be corrupted, or even possibly blank.

As he puzzled on this for a moment, trying to link it to the static he visualised earlier, Zane brushed past his shoulder with a forceful nudge, "Stay out of my phone dude!" He growled softly before quickly leaving the hall.

More than one of them felt that they were being managed. Even the veneer of school authorities prioritising the safety of the school and students was not enough to allay the persistent feeling that something significant had happened, and they had some insight that did not gel with what they had been told. The 9th and 12th years were dismissed, and the 10th and 11th years' classes were wrapped up as the first day of school was declared to be over perfunctorily, no after-class remedials, no late enrichment activities, no training sessions. Harris saw to it that the premises were cleared of students, like he would at the end of each day.

But if in future they were to look back at their first day of senior school, they would remember the day not because of the ominous presence of some out-of-place staff that joined the school, nor even because of the strangest of incidents that occurred in that afternoon which was accompanied by what felt like a momentary erasure that affected everyone. For a freshman was seen to be present, and then she subsequently wasn't. In fact she was seen by and interacted with various people, but others did not seem to know about or recognise her existence.

What they would remember was how they responded to the incident. There was certainly their attempt to make sense of it, according to their character. But there was also something else, some innate impulse, some unbidden inclination, to attune themselves to a higher understanding of the situation, a different way of seeing their reality. They realised they did not have to see what they witnessed in consensus or conformity. For Joe, Jonathan, Kyle, Minsoo, Myra, Torrance and Wren, the incident spoke to them in different ways, and they realised that they were being spoken to differently, in a way that enabled them to see beyond the mundane. Most significantly, they would remember how they discovered they had the ability to influence the world around them, and make their mark on their reality.