[Pre-Fall] Chapter 0: Re-Orientation

Fall in Massachusetts, with its quintessentially New England brilliant foliage and crisp, cool air, was nearly upon Ashford. For the students of Ashford State High School, the end of summer meant the resumption of a new school term, and for you, it will mean the culmination of your educational journey, your final year in high school. Your high stakes exams have cleared (for most of you), what is left is for you to complete your remaining modules to maximise your credits, and perhaps finish off your capstone projects so that you can prepare for your college entrance exams. Though that depended on whether getting to college was still important to you. At the cusp of adulthood, change was in the air, as oxygen, to be inhaled deeply, necessarily. There were choices to be made, and paths to take.

Today is your first day back at school! Not yet bogged down by the routines of schoolwork or the commitments to your extra curricular activities, the first day was something to look forward to: friends you haven’t seen all summer, new classes to take, the cafeteria food (for some), and for you, the freedom that comes from being seniors. Already on the road to campus were students arriving in all modes of transportation: some took the pleasant walk from town, others cycled, the privileged drove. The handful of bikers were always the loudest. Rounding the slight slope past the last turn brought you to the old-fashioned arched gates of the landscape, now automated and enchanced with modern security features. No doubt the watchful eyes of ‘Officer’ Harris (as they liked to call him, given his previous career in law enforcement) scanned them from somewhere as they entered, student safety paramount in these times.

Hundreds of students making their way into campus singly or in groups, with squeals of happy greetings when friends caught up to each other, enthusiastic hails (or discreet avoidance) when passing members of the teaching staff who themselves were back for another academic cycle. Ashford High, seen from the direction of the campus entrance, visually greeted visitors with the gleaming contemporary edifice of its most well-funded building, the STEM Magnet Labs, impressive for being the best high school science facility in greater Boston, behind which sprawled the rest of the more traditional buildings of old.

Some of the excitable hordes turned left, perhaps towards the cafeteria for breakfast, or further in towards the gymnasium and sports complex, and most would report to their homerooms in the various blocks. But the senior year students knew they had to first head to Founders Hall for their first assembly at 9am, where Headmaster Blackwood would address them, no doubt to welcome them back and impress upon them the significance of their final year.

It would not do to be late!

The interior of Founders Hall inevitably evoked a sense of stately history and academic tradition; the wisteria-covered stone structure was the oldest building on campus, and in fact its size sufficed to house the entire school's (albeit much smaller) population and classes at its founding in 1896.

Today the seniors were to gather in the main auditorium to start their year, all four hundred Grade 12 students converging towards the Hall after reaching campus on time. Interestingly, while Founders Hall was the most significant building of Ashford High, the geographical centre of the entire campus was actually the Redevelopment Wing, sometimes referred to as the Burned Wing by the more knowing students. Whether you arrived by school bus or car or on foot, or if you were trying to navigate your way from the sports complex to your classroom, you would have to pass by a structure that appeared to be in a state of semi-construction and redevelopment. For the seniors, who have been in Ashford for four years, this renovation had been ongoing ever since they were freshmen. Certain sections of the building were in still in use, notably housing the counselling centre, but other parts remained closed off in a perpetual state of reconstruction.

But no one typically lingered near its vicinity, not at 8.58 am on a Monday morning in August, first day of term. Joe, Jonathan, Kyle, Minsoo, Myra, Torrance and Wren entered the auditorium separately and looked for where their class was roughly seated as student councillors herded them to settle down in their places so that assembly could begin. The rest of the gang were there, kind of: Cass was probably up and about doing her council duties, but Raven and Julian were already slouched in their seats waiting for things to start, Shawn was giggling away and pointing at some funny thing that probably wasn't that funny, and Sabrina was indeed chattering away full tilt with her posse, exchanging three months worth of gossip. In the incessant tumble of words she seemed to say something about Alex not being in school for some reason, but the councillors were really pleading for everyone to take their seats, for on stage, where the teachers were already seated, they could see Cass stepping up to the podium to get ready to invite Headmaster Blackwood to address them.

Torrance is looking around dissaprovingly in the way someone who knows they have better things to do than what they are about to, judging the gathering and the auditorium and the herding teachers in tired, bored dissaproval.
And is still considering trying to slip out.

Joe has been rubbernecking, trying to get his bearings since he arrived. After seeing Emily off towards her class, and gratefully taking a mouthful of water from his bottle while the late summer sun and morning breeze help cool him, he allows himself to be shepherded into the hall. I’m a new cog in an old machine; time to think coggish and go with the flow while I learn how this place works, he reckons. Slim and modestly athletic, he straightens his open-neck shirt and focuses on not walking into anyone or anything while trying to take in as much as he can. Settling down, he looks around at the people around him, wondering who they all are; then, so as not to stare obviously, he polishes his spectacles, and waits, calmly.

Wren slipped into the auditorium with her skateboard still tucked under her arm, headphones around her neck like always. Her copper hair was windswept from the ride up, her dark green hoodie slightly rumpled. She scanned the rows of seats, the four hundred seniors creating a wall of noise that made her jaw tighten.

The vaulted ceiling of Founders Hall amplified everything - voices, footsteps, the scrape of chairs - but underneath it all was that other sound. That constant hum that had been following her all summer. Worse here, in this old stone building, like the walls themselves were holding their breath.

She found a seat toward the edge, somewhere she could breathe. Close enough not to stand out, far enough not to drown in the noise. Her skateboard propped against her legs.

Just normal. Just senior year. Just an assembly.

The pressure was building. Too many people, too much sound. Wren pulled her headphones up over her ears - the same thing she'd done a hundred times before to manage the overwhelm.

But this time, in the silence the noise-cancellation created, something shifted. The hum didn't fade - it clarified. Sharpened. Like tuning a radio and suddenly catching the signal. Threads of resonance she'd been sensing all summer suddenly became audible, patterns woven through the old building that she couldn't name but could no longer ignore.

Myra walks into the auditorium in her oxeblood coat and just absorbs the room - and is disappointed?! She quickly finds her place near her classmates, while she examines this surprising emotion.
This has always been the main auditorium and the centre of the school, but now, it's somehow smaller.
Sabrina's gossiping seems so shallow and insignificant.

She nods to Torrance and Jove as she passes them.

No its not the school that has changed, it's her. She spent her summer sailing the Mediterranean, working at archaeological dig sites. Being away from home and living by herself for almost a month has changed her - for the better. So much has changed, she has moved so far, that it feels like her friends and school haven't moved at all and thus are far behind.Please be interesting. Please don't be boring. She mutters to herself as she turns her attention to the podium.

Kyle walks in and automatically moves towards the back of the seats, his preferred location to be out of sight and out of mind. They're full already. Shifting slightly he heads towards on of the sides and passes the scatter with the headphones. I guess that's one advantage, no need to lock up he thinks as he knows he passed her on the way in but she beat him to the assembly as he had to divert and lock up his bike at one of the racks.

He scans the faces around him. He was only here half of last year so most are still unfamiliar to him and he knows few names. Seeing an opening he slides into a spot a bit behind and towards the center of the room, dumps his pack and pulls out his phone. The kids around Kyle shift but otherwise ignore him, something that has been happening alot more since things got weird at the end of the last term. Hooking into the schools wifi was simple enough and he started testing it's security just to pass the time. He then pauses and looks around, curious to see if things looked any different. Since things got weird he has been getting odd flashes and impressions from different people and lotions. He's still trying to figure out what it all means

Pre-assembly calisthenics aside, Jon had some mixed emotions walking up the steps of Founder's Hall. The steps and railings still held the night's chill even as the sun's rays warmed everything the light touched. The whole affair hung with the feeling of closed circles, the beginning of the end and the end of beginnings. A couple of girls hurried past him as he stood on the marble steps looking up at the Hall, the feeling of an Ouroboros moment delaying him for just a beat. He cracked a slim smile and shook his head to dismiss the portentous pressure he felt building inside him.

Inside the Hall, all dark wood and brass older than his great grandparents, soaked up the light and muffled the sounds of the 400-odd students gathering inside. Familiar faces cropped up out of the crowd along with new students he'd never laid eyes on before. He nodded as he passed the well-dressed girl at the auditorium doorway. Myra Lockwood, the very definition of old money & prestige, looking as if she were surveying her domain as he spoke to her , "Back in the States, eh? Eventful summer?" Rumor was she'd spent the summer abroad and the dusky color of her skin confirmed she'd seen plenty of sun. He noticed the eye contact passing between Lockwood and Sabrina, and the lack of love lost between the two girls. Jon was one of the few people who were on-the-level civil with the Gossip Girl; he had nothing to fear from her. Almost everyone else walked on eggshells around Sabrina, careful of what she may (or may not) know about them. Honestly, he felt pity for her. It must be exhausting living in her world of secrets and false faces. It was exhausting even being in proximity to it. Regardless, he met Sabrina's gaze and gave an acknowledging half-smile her way before turning back to Myra. She seemed different than before, somehow crestfallen or let down in some way.

Minsoo slips into the room; one of the last to arrive. She rubs the cuff of her tartan shirt against her forehead, as beads of sweat were just beginning to glisten there. Just as Wren was adjusting her headphones, so too was Minsoo adjusting hers; pulling them down to sit around her neck like some sort of airplane pillow.

"Sorry, sorry!" she says politely enough as she shimmies down the row of seated students until she finds her friends. She fumbles with her phone as the music still streams out of the unworn headset. She loved all types of music, but there was still something embarrassing about other kids hearing what she was listening to: Like they were peeking behind the curtain at her most vulnerable self.

"Phew! I was worried I was going to miss this." she says, rolling her eyes and jostling her friends as a joke.

Torrence nodded to Kim in sarcastic agreement, not overly familiarly, but enough to acnowledge the comment and agree with it.
It wasnt that Torrence was trying to be distant, but more that he was terrible at making friends and didnt really have any. At least as far as he was aware.

The students were seated in rows roughly according to their form class, at four hundred students per cohort that meant eight senior classes altogether, although they would split and join classes according to subject specialisations, meaning one would know a whole bunch of other schoolmates beyond one's own class.

On stage you could see a mix of familiar and few faces among the teachers arrayed. As befitting the graduating batch, some of the most experienced teaching staff were on that stage, no doubt assigned to bring to bear their expertise to sharpen the most brilliant minds. Dr Thorne, Dr Veritas and Professor Strom were the science triumvirate helming their respective departments at the STEM lab, all three seated next to each other. Ms Alwood, your form teacher last year, made eye contact with some of you, leading you to wonder if she would continue to be your form teacher this year. Coach Corbin swapped his usual tracksuit for a proper sportsjacket, but this would be the only day you would catch him wearing one. The two individuals whose suits made them appear more out of place than the coach were seated closest to Headmaster Blackwood's chair, for they seemed to be wearing identically matched dark grey tailored wool, one male, one female, with the tightest of combed back hairstyles.

The atmosphere was lively and abuzz, the air electric, even if there were those for whom coming back to school was a cause for anxiety, or received with indifference, or worse, downright empty and void of feeling.

Myra and Torrance somehow had the sensation that they were being observed, although the classmates in the seats next to them did not seem to feel the same thing. Perhaps 'observed' was too strong a word, they felt 'sensed', or 'registered', or 'noted'. It was vague, fleeting, but present nonetheless.

More affected were Kyle and Wren, in their stilling themselves to go with the flow of their surroundings. For Kyle, the available networks list showing on his phone had a bunch of options he did not recognise. Not that that itself was an issue, but it was the case that some of the strange ones seemed to give off a stronger signal strength than even the school's own networks. Wren's encounter was more frazzling. She expected the usual when she tucked the headphones over her ears, which was an isolating of frequencies. What she got instead was a shock. Joe, and Jonathan, just a few chairs away in the next row, seemed to be 'shouting' at her through the speakers, so loud that she had to pull them off again quickly.

"Welcome back, Senior students of Ashford State High School!" Headmaster Blackwood began just as the large clock above the auditorium stage showed 9am sharp. "It is good to see all of you well rested and eager for another year of learning what your love. I hope that you spent your summer fruitfully ..." But the same thought struck Joe, Jonathan, Kyle, Minsoo, Myra, Wren and Torrance separately, almost, but not quite at the same time. Surely they had been seated for the better part of four to five minutes. Decidedly each of them cut across the school grounds, past the Redevelopment Wing at 8.58am, especially if they glanced at their watches to assure themselves that they made it on time. Also concerningly each of them was worried about not making it to school on time, for Harris would close the gates on everyone at 0900 hours on the dot, and they all barely made it.

Were they even ever at risk of being late?

Blackwood's welcome speech gathered momentum, but not everyone was listening.

Rested and eager…

Minsoo let air blow through her nose in derision, but only enough for her own benefit. That was one way to put her feelings surrounding summer ending!

It felt like only five minutes ago that the bell had rung and dismissed them for the summer vacation. And yet… Five minutes. She puts a hand to the scruff of her t-shirt and flaps it out and in to cool down. She was still a bit hot, but the sweating, little though it was had stopped. Which meant…

She’d been here… How long had she been here?…

She wrinkles her nose at the odd little thought, but shakes the thought free and continues to listen to Blackwood.

Or at least she tried…

Myra is looking around the room for the source of the sensension of being watched. She noticed it when she came home from her trip, how a shape was put around her when she entered her family home. Something like a sleeping bag, warm, comfortable, safe, but without room to swing your arms.

Her gaze landed on the twins, the strange newcomers.
Does anyone know who they are? She asks quietly.
The twins in the grey suits up there, next to the headmaster?

She is sure that it's them that is giving her the observation-vibe.

Joe is puzzled. He barely had time to see Emily off in the direction of her class before coming straight into the hall; and he’s fairly sure he’s been sitting here for a few minutes. Yet the principal -Headmaster- rose to speak on the very dot of nine a.m. suggesting that he’s an old-school stickler out to send a message.
Fat lot of good that is if the main hall clock is slow, but maybe the Head has no sense of irony or introspection, and doesn’t realise his message is wide of the mark, and very publicly too.
Joe surreptitiously checks his watch against the clock; he’s not going to dig out his phone, he suspects that could too easily attract unwanted attention. He idly wonders if he’s hearing a speech given exactly the same, word-for-word and beat-for-beat, to every new group of Seniors, and begins checking to see if the Head is hitting any other beats equally pointedly.

Jon has settled into a seat arrayed around his Form class and settled back. These first-day addresses tended to be, more or less, a dress rehearsal for the graduating speeches the Headmaster and teaching staff would give next May. The kind of thing peppered with references that they'd callback to in 8-9 months time and feel clever about. Very few, if any, of the students ever caught the references and fewer cared.
He sat near Teller and Shawn Ryans, mainly because he knew Shawn could be entertaining...and to keep the 'troublemakers' grouped together for easier surveillance by the school staff. He thought is was too early in the year to be causing issues. Yet.

He'd been studying his way through the ocean of faces around him, new and old, while he ignored the Headmaster's speech. Croft's mention of the time and the sudden chiming of the bell refocused Jon's attention back to the moment at hand. It couldn't be just now 9am... He'd barely made it up the school steps at 8:58. Maybe the bell was off? Maybe something over the summer had set it back a few minutes. *Odd...* Jon thought to himself. *That's twice in as many hours that something weird happened. First the dream-rewind and now this. Spooky...*

He heard Myra whispering a couple of rows away from him and made eye contact with her. Shrugging his ignorance about the Twins, he whispered back. "No idea who they are. Hope they're not new Counselors..." He was sure Croft would introduce them soon.

Myra whispers back. They look like they could suck out the joy of a rainbow

Looking at all the other teens around himself Kyle wishes he was better at approaching people. Groups are so tough. He can almost manage one or two, if there is an easy in but in this situation . . . He shakes his head and stretches just as Mrs Blaskwook starts talking.A moment after he notices the time it hit hm and he glancing at the clock, then his phone, then wrist watch. Kyle wonders if the school clock is out of sync and chuckles to himself. How many "synced" devices supposedly pulling from the same 'atomic clock' source all ended up showing a 5 minute spread. This might come in handy if he can just figure out the offset and if it can be tweaked. Barely listening to the talk he checks his network scan logs for recent activity and time stamp to see what if anything happened since he started scanning the networks.

Hearing some whispers about twins he finally notices the two students(?) at the front with the adults and rewinds to review last year. Nope they were definitely not there so should not be on the student council, so why are they up front.

Torrance is used to being watched, in a you're-special we-expect-great-great-things sort of way. So, the feeling was not unexpected st school, but he did look around for the source of the focused attention.

Minsoo casts an eye over the newcomers. It wasn’t unusual for new students and staff to show up at the start of the year.

"Beats me! Maybe they’ll get a special introduction!" she says, knowing that neither student nor staff member relished the chance to have so many judging, teenage eyes on them!

"... this year you will have our lead professors themselves guide you through your final projects ..." Blackwood had moved on to introducing the senior year teachers in turn; there was a new Art head teacher, Denise Lance, whose dress sense put the more drab staff members to shame. And as Jonathan and Minsoo predicted, the headmaster did finally get round to introducing the suited pair. "This year, our school is pleased to have Mr Necht and Ms Nixon from the Masschusetts State Board on staff as your career and education guidance counselors. I know how critical, and how difficult it can be, to make good decisions about your college of choice and course of study. They will be the ones exploring the options together with you and talk through how you should put together your portfolio, and recommend additional co-curricular programmes that will enhance your future path. As a Harvard alumnus myself, I cannot emphasise how much ..." The headmaster went off on one of his tangents, though generally his audience bore it patiently as he wasn't typically too long-winded about such anecdotes.

Jonathan was near prescient in his anticipation, they were counselors! Of a sort. Daniela, who was among those seated between Myra and him, nearly snorted in agreement with Myra's observation, "Brr, they'll probably headhunt us to join the civil service. You really think they're twins?" Ever the photographer, she took out her phone to see if she could get a shot of the state board pair, only to find the piercing eyes of Mr Hammett, Math teacher and sometime de facto school disciplinarian, staring at her in admonishment even from the distance. She tucked the handphone back into her pocket, and followed his gaze to see that -

- Hammett had already been glaring at Kyle for the longest while, for Kyle had been busy fiddling with his own phone, too engrossed to have noticed that he had been spotted playing with his phone than paying attention. "Kyle!" Daniela hissed at him to signal that Kyle had been spotted. For Kyle was undoubtedly absorbed in his sleuthing. An inaccurate auditorium clock was easily explained, and it did read differently than his analog wristwatch, which also had a different time from his handphone. Kyle understood differentials to attribute his handphone time as being synced to network time protocols (NTP), for that was how handphone clocks. He would need his computer if he really wanted to have a crack at Verizon's server, but his attention kept being drawn to the discrepancy between the various wifi SSIDs he could scroll through, two of which stood out for their strong network signal strength, ASHS_ECG, and PStL_0205. Could networks affect other networks? But now he realised he had been too obvious in his inattention!

Wren was not distracted by Blackwood's musings; she was thinking so hard at Necht and Nixon, the same way she would whenever she encountered people she would rather intuit than trust her already perceptive senses. Her inner imagination took off: she visualised them going about their duties in their sleek suits and slicked back hair and dark shades (but perhaps she was stereotyping them too quickly into the doppelganger villains of pop culture movies); she saw the man lift his shades to reveal pupil-less eyes boring into her own, she heard the woman open her mouth, but instead of hearing words spoken she heard silence instead, a silence that seemed to negate all surrounding sound. It was way too early to be daydreaming, if that's what this was, and she tried to damp down the vividness in her head before she realised that Joe, who was sitting just one seat in front, let out a troubled groan and yelp, and began to tilt to one side as he began to slide off his seat.

"Joe, are you okay?" Kirk, next to him, reached out with his burly arm to grab Joe's wrist as he slid, but missed, causing his own chair to screech backwards a couple of inches towards where Torrance and Minsoo were as he tried to help his friend. For Joe's last thought was his using that bit of his science brain to rationalise whether Blackwood's speech was on loop, or whether time was on loop. What he did not expect was an overwhelmingly palpable sense of déjà vu that made the room spin as he fell sideways ...

Kyle always keeps the phone out of any teachers line of sight, all kids know to do that. The trick was to act as if there never had been a phone. Rather than attempting to pocket the phone he lets it slip down onto his pack, further out of sight, and adjust his posture from slumping forward to lounging back. Never looking at the teachers but just zoning out as he let his eyes wander over the podium.

I'll need to keep track of the local networks. he thinks to himself, noting the current scan will keep running for now as he left it active.

Myra jumps on to her chair. From the secure vantage point of her chair, she looks around the floor for the snake she is expecting to have bitten Joe. This was a problem ine Greece that she had to be aware of snakes.
Is there a snake??

"Idk about civil service..." Jon responded to Daniela under his breath. "...they smell more Corporate to me. But yeah, headhunters for sure." the Ashford to Ivy League pipeline was pretty well established but this kind of blatancy was a bit too 'on the nose' for his comfort. They looked like the kind of people who thought mayonnaise was spicy and any color deeper than beige might be outré and they were now poised to have access to every student at Ashford. Especially the senior class.

The sudden motion of Kirk Kallum to catch Joe as he spasmed and slumped to the side cut off his musing about the two new career guidance counselors. Jon was in motion moments after Kirk and moved to help in any way he could. Not that he had any kind of medical training but just sitting there watching wasn't exactly in his nature. "Lay him on the floor and put his legs up on the chair..." he told Kirk as Jon hopped over the rows of students to help. "Maybe he's having a seizure or epileptic episode ..." The drama was maybe not cause a commotion but Myra's comment about snakes was sure to get attention.

ooc: maybe Jon could block Hammet's line of sight to Kyle on his way to help Joe and run cover for him to hide his phone.

Joe’s been trying to focus on the headmaster’s speech while also having one eye on his watch, but his attention wanders… onto the two counsellors. They weren’t what he’d expected, and… those composed, impenetrable eyes seemed to draw his focus… as if they were wearing mirror shades, but they’re not… are they?
A thought strikes, something half-recalled… subknowledge, like knowledge you didn’t know you had?… he’s struggling to find it, he can almost feel it calling out to him, but he’s feeling increasingly groggy -

Career counselors. From the state board.

Wren's jaw tightened. The twins - Necht and Nixon - stood there in their grey suits, and everything in her wanted to look away. But she'd already committed, already sunk into that listening space, trying to understand what they were.

The visualization hit without warning.

Not quite a daydream, too vivid for that. She saw Necht lift his shades - pupil-less eyes boring into her. Nixon's mouth opening, and instead of words, silence. Not absence of sound but anti-sound, a void that swallowed everything around it, negating music and noise and life itself.
Wren's breath caught. Her hands gripped her skateboard hard enough that her knuckles went white.

Stop. They're just counselors. You're being paranoid.

But she'd been telling herself "just" all summer. Just the hum. Just places that felt too loud or too quiet. Just her imagination. What if she'd been wrong? What if when she looked at them - really looked - she'd actually seen something real? The vision hadn't felt like daydreaming. It felt like truth.

A groan cut through her thoughts. Joe - the new kid with glasses, one row ahead - made a sound between distress and confusion. He tilted sideways, sliding off his seat. Kirk lunged to catch him, missed, his chair screeching backward.

Wren half-stood, frozen between sitting and standing. His presence had just severed - like a note cut mid-sustain. And the twins, still perfectly still on stage, radiating that same negating quality.

They did something to him.
The thought sounded insane even in her own head. Yet it sounded no less real.

Wren closed her eyes for a heartbeat and listened - really listened, the way she did when trying to find a melody buried in noise. Trying to hear what had just happened, what was still happening, the underlying frequencies that made Joe's resonance drop out like that.

Torrance is going to look over and see if he can figure out what is wrong.

With mention of civil service and corporate, Minsoo tugs at her yellow, tartan shirt and is aware of the streaks of color in her hair. These two would not gel well with the music-loving athlete, she feared.

But then Joe, was that his name, was toppling over. And the people around her started scrambling. Minsoo had seen people collapse after exerting themselves on the track, but surely the boy hadn’t run a marathon this morning.

Joe's dizziness barely lasted an instant. One moment he felt present, as a student listening to the droning of a headmaster's speech. But simultaneously he felt a different version of himself, also present, trying to process what was going on. The effect of both singularities was not something he was familiar with; he had a lot more to learn from those who were privately trying to teach him how to deal with his newfound abilities.

He wondered if the disconcerting presence of Necht and Nixon, the new guidance counsellors, were the cause of his momentary instability. He couldn't be too sure, just like he wasn't sure whether it was because he was conscious of his own hyper-perception that led to him second-guessing whether he was being affected by Necht and Nixon, or whether it was because they were indeed behind his grogginess.

Wren though was less doubtful; drawn into herself again, she couldn't help but feel as if the counsellors did this, and once again tried to get a sense of what she thought of as the 'vibe' or energy, or essence present in all places. She was so sure in had to be the twins that she felt their energy, but then she felt much more strongly, Joe's overwhelming essence instead. Wasn't the cause of the fainting Joe hyper-extending himself? Did she just find out something about him that confirmed the earlier 'shouting' she picked from Joe? Should she ask him about it if she were to have a chance?

The another person who delved into her own understanding of what might have happened was Myra. Somehow, she felt that she could sense the connections between things and people. In her mundane understanding of the world, she saw a snake, and imagined a literal one that might've found its way into the auditorium. But perhaps that was her subconscious expressing the notion of connection, a tail at one end, a head at other end, connecting Joe with something, someone, on stage? Myra now also felt a connection to Joe, as if she were sitting right next them even though they were a few seats away, also a little unsteady and about to fall down. Was the 'snake' biting her as well? What was the cause, and what was the effect?

Some others were more actively pragmatically minded. Jonathan's first instinct was to run cover. Joe wasn't even in his radar, for Jonathan had spotted Hammet giving Kyle an admonishing look, and gracefully pivoted to block whatever Kyle was doing with his phone because Kyle couldn't scramble in time to hide his phone from plain sight. Between muscle jock Kirk and himself, Kirk might be the stronger, but Jonathan was definitely the swifter, agile enough to run interference for Kyle, and also to take charge of the situation by reaching Joe before any one else.

Torrance was one step behind Jonathan. He made no extra moves, it was sufficient for him to observe Joe to draw his own conclusions. And while he was astute enough to take in all the signs of what was happening, Torrance felt no inclination to draw any conclusions at all. This was in marked contrast to Minsoo who was also staring at the commotion, but she inferred the more obvious health diagnoses; surely it must be diabetes or epilepsy or some such, similiar to what Jonathan thought s well, for little did Minsoo know that Joe had spent the better part of the morning jogging to school in order not to be late. Wasn't that the most logical conclusion to draw for either Minsoo or Jonathan, or for Torrance who probably had the best understanding of the medical situation even though he withheld judgement?

The commotion of course drew the concerned attention of the teachers in the hall. Blackwood paused his speech, about to say something over the microphone, but coach Corbin had already leapt out of his chair to make his way off the stage and up the aisle towards where Joe had slipped, and Ms Alwood had whipped out her phone, presumably to call the school nurse. Cassandra, the council president seated nearby, jumped to give Jonathan a hand to try to get Joe into a more comfortable position. Joe himself could feel the dizziness pass, but he had to decide for himself whether to take it easy and catch a breather, or brush off the crowd so as not to draw attention to the strange sensations he was feeling.

"... you will be receiving your new timetables from your assigned form teachers, effective tomorrow. School will begin as usual at 8am." Vice-principal Marston wrapped up, to stifled groans from the 12th graders. "Today, as planned, you will fulfil the roles of seniors leading the orientation programme for the freshmen. The student councillors assigned to your class will brief you again on what's next. I expect you to showcase to our first years the best of Ashford High! Parare in posterum!

With that, the morning's address was over. The preparations for freshie orientation were planned even before term closed before summer break, and some more assidous student committees even returned to school at the tail end of summer to do the final touches and set up the various school facilities for orientation. The work was divided into those who would run the class bonding activities and orientation get-to-know-you games in the morning, and those who had to man the booths for the co-curricular showcase in the early afternoon, where the freshies interested in, say, track, would head to the field for an introduction and possibly tryouts, whereas those interested in robotics would make a beeline for the engineering lab to see the preview of student projects on automation. Potential art students would check out the cosy exhibition of artworks created and curated by their seniors; there were many different things going on today!

Wren closed her eyes and listened - the way she did when trying to hear a melody buried beneath noise, trying to understand what had just happened.

But what hit her wasn't the twins' negating silence.

It was Joe. His presence didn't fade - it blazed, overwhelming, like standing too close to amplifiers cranked to eleven. Whatever she'd expected to sense, this wasn't it. Not suppression or severing, but something burning so bright it hurt to perceive.

What the hell...

Coach Corbin was already moving off the stage. Ms Alwood had her phone out. Jonathan reached Joe first, and Cassandra was there too, trying to help get him into a better position. The moment had passed, and Wren was just standing there, halfway out of her seat, skateboard clutched against her legs.

She sat back down slowly, heart still racing.

The twins were still on stage. Joe was surrounded by people trying to help. And Wren had no idea what she'd just felt, except that it was real. Magically, impossibly real.

If she got the chance, she needed to talk to him.

Myra slowly untangled herself from her chair. People were starting to mill about, and she had to get to her stand. She was still a little shaken over the sensation of connectedness with Joe. Was it snakes or pathways she saw?

The headmaster uttered the school's motto. Parare in posterum! - Prepare for the future! That is just a fancy catchphrase, said by someone who doesn't know any better. Being annoyed with the headmaster grounded her to the present, and she shook off the sensation.

She was doe at the Student Library Committee and the math team -stand. She had arranged that the two booths were located next to each other. Unfortunatly Cass Devereaux, being Daddy's little girl, had secured the best pavilion for the student council. Myra had a hard time listening to Cass talk. How someone could be both a perfectionist and an airhead was something she would never understand - and Myra would be just across from Cass.

When she sees one of her classmates walk by, she asks. Is Joe okey? She can't leave the booths as she is setting up flyers and posters for the library and math teams' activities.

Given what most adults believed about this generation of kids, they might be astounded by the immediate reaction of Joe's classmates to his sudden distress. Jon couldn't really say he had any dealings with Joe that left any sizeable impression on him but that didn't make Jon hesitate in the slightest. Blocking Hemmet from mean-mugging Kyle messing around on TikTok, or whatever he was doing, was just a convenient bonus. Getting on Hemmet's radar early in the school year wasn't the best way to start senior year. No sense in carrying that curse... Jon stayed on Hemmet's list of 'usual suspects' and didn't wish that on anyone else.

Whether it was an over response or appropriate reaction, Joe seemed to recover just as quickly as the fainting spell had come on. Inwardly, Jon was glad it didn't spiral into an actual medical emergency. Despite jumping immediately into the fray, he really had no idea what to next if it had been an emergency...he just felt like he had to act. It was as if something inside him had pushed him to aid Joe, protect him from something Jon couldn't quite put his finger on.

Seeing the light of intelligence flaring in Joe's bewildered eyes, Jon breathed a sigh of relief and clapped his classmate on the shoulder and helped right the kid back in his seat. "Thanks for the help, man." he nodded to Kallum. "Good catch." He knew he was at the center of the commotion and that drew attention...the kind he didn't care for. Behind that, however, he felt scrutiny unlike the normal teenage 'attention economy'. It had the feeling of being stalked by a hidden predator, like unseen eyes hungrily observing prey behind obscuring savannah grass.
Oddly, Jon could almost smell the heated, earthy aroma of the Serengeti, hear the rustling of reeds in the hot wind and the cadence of insects. It was like he was in two places simultaneously. He ran his hand through his hair and shut the sub-Saharan image out of his mind and focused on where he was. Where he was supposed to be. "You gonna be okay?" he asked Joe, more to anchor himself in the Ashford High assembly than expecting an answer.

---

Post-Assembly, Jon found himself distractedly wandering over to the Arts Club set up. Helping to assemble the awning over the group table and putting up the black wire displays that were to hold senior portfolio pieces, he felt more centered than he had during the student assembly.

Art was one of those curricular tracks that tended to attract a variety of underclassmen, usually for all the wrong reasons. Some viewed it as a 'do nothing', easy-A class and used it as a dodge for signing up for the more academically challenging classes. Others because they felt like they had something to say but lacked the skills to adequately express themselves. The former at least moved on and eventually took a different curricular track; the latter usually stayed but still struggled with expression. Jon had gone in as one of the former but had become one of the latter. He definitely had something to say and found the skills to say it...and it often made people uncomfortable or angry. With that in mind, the two pieces of Jon's to display were selected for him by the Arts Chair to avoid any unpleasantness. Under the awning at the Arts Club table, being generally moody and unhelpful, sat Julian Markov and Zarah Steinbach.

The assembly ended and seniors dispersed to their assigned orientation duties. Wren headed toward the music wing, grateful for something concrete to do. Physical tasks. Normal routines. Better than having nothing to distract from Joe's overwhelming presence still echoing in her perception like feedback she couldn't tune out.

She still didn't know what she'd sensed - only that it had been real. Magically, impossibly real. And the twins were still there on stage when she'd looked back, perfectly still in their grey suits, radiating that same wrongness she'd caught from Nixon.

The music wing needed prep work: practice rooms unlocked, equipment checked, the upright piano accessible for anyone who wanted to demonstrate. Most freshmen who signed up for music wouldn't stay past sophomore year - they'd realize it required more dedication than they wanted to give, or they'd found their actual interest elsewhere. The ones who stayed were the ones who needed it.

Wren had been one of those. Piano first, then guitar and drums because her hands needed more ways to translate what her ears picked up.

Near the main entrance, a few other students were already setting up chairs and flyers about band and chorus schedules. Wren shouldered her skateboard and headed inside, trying to focus on the simple, manageable task of showing freshmen where things were.

"Air in Posterior." Minsoo says, just at the same time as the VP uttered the school’s most sacred words. She adds a little fart sounds for good effect, and for the benefit of those friends around her.

Once they’d seen to Joe, and assured that everything was okay, Minsoo slips away to organize the track where new students would be expected to show… well, if not their best times, then some pretty okay times.

Running under the morning’s sun would mean shedding the tartan shirt and headphones that were tying her whole look together. Underneath, a white track club Tshirt with last year’s year on the back, and black run-leggings underneath.

She gives the whistle that would be used to start the sprints a few practice blows before the freshies arrive. They hadn’t entrusted the students with a starting gun… for good reason!

Kyle throws a thankful glance Daniela's and Jonathan's way, taking note of their appearances so he can repay the favor in the future, and mutters a low "Thanks man" to Joe in passing as he gathers up his things. At least someone noticed him and was trying to be helpful. He wonders about the commotion with Joe but decides he doesn't know enough to just watches where Daniella, Johnathan, and Joe head curious to see how things will turn out. Making friends has never been easy but situations can be great at forming bonds. He hopes he gets more chances to bump into them.

Shuffling out with the crowd Kyle checks the schedule and notes he doesn't really need to be anywhere in a hurry as both the cross country team and the robotics club as set to host for the fresh men in the afternoon. As there is little to do for cross country he sighs in resignation as he heads towards the STEM section of the orientation, where he expects to encounter some members of the robotics club in the hopes that the summer has smoothed out most of the ruffled feathers from last years fiasco.

Joe found himselves sharing his own head, and none of them were used to the sensation. There was listening to the headmaster; there was watching the time; there was maintaining awareness of the hall, the seat under him, the students around him, the staff watching them; there was the subtle subconscious balancing of muscle tension that kept a biped sitting upright on the mostly flat surface of the chair; there was the inner other trying to fulfil the need to balance all these tasks; and somehow one himself that could manage all these tasks alone without thinking about most of it was now multiplied.
Each of himself, unprepared, tried to manage everything. There was no coordination. No strife, but chaos, like a sudden scrambling for control of several people trying to control a moving car simultaneously. No understanding of something totally new.
Predictably, none of them was succeeding. The body they shared couldn’t literally fall apart from confusion, but it couldn’t do anything purposeful either. Staying conscious and sitting upright were out of the question.
Then something outer - probed.
The inner other retreated suddenly, as if at the mere possibility of a touch horrifyingly inimical. Immediately himselves coalesced into one. Simplicity and familiarity of sensation struck with dizzying force, like a cold bucketful of vertigo.
Joe was sitting, a bit uneasily, in his seat. There were people around him, anxious. Their proximity, reassuring to some deep part of him. A new coherent thought surfaced.
No strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet.
He forced his eyes open, regaining his posture, suppressing a wave of nausea.
Grey suits still staring
What happened
No! No no no NO!
He swallowed the turmoil, forced it down, sat upon it.
"Sorry. I’m okay." Fighting for normalcy, he tried to centre himself, wave off the helpful hands, dispel the sudden attention. Once the headmaster resumed speaking, his heartbeat began to calm.
Hell, that was embarrassing he thought to himself.
As the cold sweat dissipated, he realised that everyone else had an idea of where they were meant to be, but he hadn’t been around when those plans were being made, wasn’t a part of them. He knew he wanted out of the sight of those grey suits though. His rational mind came to the rescue. I may technically be a senior, but for practical purposes I’m as freshman as they come. Time to explore and learn. Maybe I can find the History department, or the library…

As Wren moved toward the exit with her skateboard under her arm, she spotted Joe trying to extract himself from the concerned students around him. He looked steadier now, but lost - the way new students did when they didn't know where they were supposed to go.

She moved before overthinking it.

"Hey." Her voice came out quieter than intended. "You're new, right? Joe?"

He turned, and for a second she wondered if he'd felt it - her listening, her sensing that overwhelming presence. But his expression was just confusion and residual embarrassment.

"Music wing's this way if you're assigned there," she offered, adjusting her headphones. "Or I can point you toward... wherever you need to be. Orientation stuff."

Post-Assembly

"It's pair of posteriors Minz." Shawn slid into the seat next to Minsoo that was vacated with the commotion ,and made a crude grabbing gesture for buttcheeks to accompany her fart sound. It was annoying that he called her Minz, but then again Shawn pretty much made fun of everything and everyone. "But yeah that was a lot of hot air. How about the other pair of asses ay?" Shawn persisted as they all eyed the new guidance counsellors when they filed out of the auditorium at the end of assembly.

"Good thinking there, both of you," Coach Corbin's approving acknowledgement of both Jonathan and Kirk's quick reactions was for Jon an affirming contrast to the palpable displacement he felt being in the midst of the centre of attention. It was uncharacteristic of him to do so, but he somehow couldn't resist the pull to action this time, as if another part of himself was the one who actually responded. "Ever think about pursuing sports medicine?" He heard Corbin's ask, but the coach's voice sounded distant.

"Figured it out all by yourself?" Sera Knowles had sidled up to stand next to Torrance, who was still motionlessly staring at Joe, "Or calculating the odds?" She was teasing Torrance surely, as a fellow Math club member, and also watching to see if Myra, her teammate for last year's Math olympiad, was responding to the commotion the same way, for Sera often thought they were the real 'brainy' ones. So she was surprised to see Myra looking distracted, and followed her gaze to see Cass fussing about the entire Joe situation without being useful as Jon and Kirk were doing.

For Kirk was about to heft Joe up when Miss Heather, the school nurse arrived. Her maiden name was Slate, but everyone in school preferred to call her Ms Heather for that suited her gentle demeanor way more that a surname related to rock. Joe had regained his composure by the time Miss Heather was attending to him. She cradled his head to peer into his eyes for other symptoms when Joe was mumbling something about being okay in an attempt to brush off the embarrassing attention. "Stop fussing, stay seated young man. You can catch your breath first, but I want you down in my office for a check-up later." "I can take him there Ms Heather!" Cass the ever-helpful offered, even though she probably had a million things to do for freshman orientation. That was the same moment when Wren hovered nearby; she had some empathy for second newest student in their class (the newest being Sven, the Euro transfer student), when she finally overcame being overwhelmed by the sensory overload of the morning.

Assembly was over, and along with that the disconcerting sense for some that their trajectory this year might take shape in hardly predictable ways. The new counsellors might be the most obvious representation of what appeared out of place, but the strange sense of being slightly out of time as well could only have added to the paradigm of change.

Freshman Orientation

The 10th and 11th graders were the less lucky ones to have their timetable kick in with morning classes even on their first day. The freshmen naturally didn't. And the 12th graders, being the seniors, were tasked with taking care of the young ones in the morning, with the afternoon entirely dedicated to the extra curricular activities showcase. Each club and society had a booth in the large multi-purpose hall so that the freshies could spend their hours visiting each in turn to find out more about the rich student life. The sports and games teams were arrayed in the gymnasium level in the same building. Part of the fun was to bring interested freshies out on campus tour to see the facilities. Potential art students would have a chance to visit the gallery in the Art block, music and dance students the respective studios, history and literature students showed their favourite library hangouts, the science and tech students to various laboratories, even the math club had a room of their own where they presumably did mathy things. The entire orientation was student-facilitated, it was a way for the seniors to demonstrate their leadership and capability to manage tasks and people, while the teachers provided overall supervision and looked out for safety.

In the massive multiple purpose hall things were abuzz! Myra had arranged it such that the Math booth sat next to the Library Comm booth, so that she could man both at the same time. Sera Knowles was there at the Math booth as well, animatedly talking about statistics and combinatorics to a small gathering of students, surprisingly a good number of them were interested in numbers! The Art Club had lined up an entire corner with easels of their creative projects, and Jon dutifully hung around his own works. It seemd though that both Julian and Zarah, who was club chairperson, thought it a little beneath them to act as gallery guides to the newbies who wandered over. What annoyed them more was the occasional drone that buzzed too close near the displays, courtesy of the robotics club, who also had a couple of neutered 'battle' bots roaming the vast hall floor like mischievous roombas. Kyle might've done the same had he decided to bring Glitch to school on the first day. He still had the software loaded in his notebook if he wanted to muck around with it, and for that reason he hung out in the hall rather than at the gym one floor below.

That was where Minsoo was, at the Track booth next to the Cross-Country runners. The awkward thing about the sports and games booths was how their members all looked as if they preferred to be outside. They were congregated there for the convenience of the freshies, but you could tell the footballers couldn't wait to walk their first group of potential trainees to the field for tryouts, and the baseballers looked like they might dangerously hit one of their balls into the massed groups of 9th graders than into the batting net they set up. The exception were the basketballers whose hoops were at one end of gym floor; you could see a couple of freshman shooting some two-on-two with the seniors. Minsoo had already stuffed her shirt into her backpack, on the lookout for the next eager sprinter before Jake from the cross-country team snapped them up!

Back upstairs Wren, who had already visited the music rooms earlier to help set them up and who had helped to bring the flyers to the hall, was pottering about on the stage section of the multi purpose hall where the string section of the symphonic band was jamming. Their quartets had won the inter-school competition for the third year running, thanks to the highly talented Cyril Walden. She had walked with Joe on the way here, but left it to him to figure out whether he was angling towards Politicas, the history and politics hybrid club, or whether he wanted to talk to Myra over by the Student Librarian stand. As a recent transfer, Joe didn't have the longstanding membership with any of these clubs, although he did join in a bunch of activities that caught his interest last year. He could still make a difference this year if he wanted; a good co-curricular record was something very useful for college applications. Somewhere amidst the orientation was also Torrance.

---

No one would have noticed exactly what time Emily Walsh walked into the multi-purpose hall, and also the gym, with three of her middle school friends. They were all in matching orientation T-shirts and black shorts, outfitted this morning for their orientation games. Emily had curly auburn hair tied in blue-scrunchied pigtails, and wore white New Balance hi-tops. In her hand was a tall tumbler she was sipping from, and she had to catch up with her friends who made straight for the first booth in the venue excitedly, dragging each other in hand-in-hand, and immediately merged into the thronging mass of enthusiastic freshies.

It was 2.58pm.

The multi-purpose hall flow is busy with freshmen in small knots, clutching maps and schedules, all talking at once. Myra does to best to weather the storm and stear the chaos. She stands at the library doors with her satchel on one shoulder, oxblood coat open, and that calm, faint-smirk confidence that makes people stop fidgeting and start listening.

She gives them the short version first, what this place is for, how not to get eaten alive by deadlines, and why the library isn’t just books but a fantastic tool. She also folds the math club pitch in as a natural extension of the same idea: curiosity with standards. The freshmen laugh at the right moments. It’s working.

The one that goes well
She spots a girl hovering at the edge of the group, half in, half out, eyes flicking between the towering shelves and the exits like she’s looking for the safest route.

Nina Patel the freshman is quiet, sharp-eyed, a scholarship kid and absolutely terrified of doing something wrong in the wrong building.
Myra doesn’t make a big deal of it. She just angles her body slightly so Nina is included in the circle and asks, casually:
Are you here more for the library… or the math club?

It’s a small question, but it’s easy. Nina answers. Myra nods when it matters and gives her simple, practical advices to where the quiet study rooms are, when the librarian’s help desk is actually useful, which math club meetings are beginner-friendly. Nina’s shoulders visibly drop. She’s no longer lost; she’s placed.

The one that doesn’t go smoothly
Ten minutes later, a boy near the front, confident in that loud, performative way, leans back on his heels and stage-whispers to the kid next to him:
So this is like… Hogwarts, but for nerds?
A couple of freshmen snort. Someone else chuckles. The vibe tips toward tour as entertainment.

Logan Mercer, is a charismatic but mildly obnoxious. He is here to be noticed, jokes first, thinks later.

Myra turns her head slowly. The faint smirk is still technically there, but it goes colder—like a teacher just asked you to repeat what you said.
It’s a library Her voice is as pleasant as a guillotine. If you want attention, the theater club is down the hall. If you want competence, you’re in the right place.

The laughter dies a little too fast. Logan’s grin falters. A few freshmen suddenly find the carpet fascinating.

Myra moves on immediately, aiming for smooth and professional, because she refuses to let one comment derail the orientation. But she can feel the ripple she caused: not disaster, just a brief, sharp chill. She hates that. She wanted them welcome. She wanted them oriented. She did not want to make someone an example.

And as she keeps talking, about stacks and study rooms and math club problem nights, she catches Nina’s eye again, just for a second. Nina looks steadier now. More anchored.

So something went wrong… but someone also got what they needed.

Assuring Miss Heather that he will stop by her office, Joe escapes as soon as he can and gratefully accepts Wren's guidance. As they walk, he explains his working priorities; academically, he’s most interested in history and related social sciences, but from a recreational and personal development perspective he’s torn between gymnastics, running, and -for reasons he seems a little vague about explaining- some form of dance; he’s as interested in developing coordination as prowess, and isn’t sure what options exist. Joe makes sure to check where Miss Heather’s office actually is, but he also keeps an eye out for both his sister and the Techno Twosome; he really wants to warn her to be on guard against the two of them, and avoid them for the rest of the day if he can. This makes him seem a little distracted, eyes always over her shoulder or tracking movement of passers-by, but he absorbs what Wren shows him, asking with genuine interest about links between the music and dance departments, and eventually thanking her politely when they part ways.
Heading to the gym, he finds it busy, noisy, and competitive and works his way around the stalls, hoping to find that at least one of the options he’s interested in is the right balance of serious and approachable…
After that, he makes for the library and history spaces…

With the 'excitement' of the Assembly lecture behind them, despite it still being the talk of the day, the Senior Class all separated out into the various cliques and interest groups that artificially divided them. Jon had done an art study last year about how students came into Ashford looking for an identity to latch onto and how their choices differentiated them... for better or worse...along with a glimpse of what might've been. It had ended up being a way more involved project than he'd initially imagined and one that had made a few of his fellow students highly upset. He'd been warned about not directly depicting his fellow students but the pieces he submitted for the Study had skirted close enough that his subjects saw themselves in the piece but with enough plausible deniability to keep any heat from coming down directly on him.

He saw the same thing in the incoming freshman class as he had before. Everyone looking for someone to become, something to latch onto and incorporate into their root identity, somewhere to belong. The high-pitched buzzing and whining of a drone hovering overhead brought him back to the present and out of his own head. He looked up at the white and blue plastic noisemaker as it looked down at him, or rather its operator did through the gimballed camera slung underneath. Jon shot a glare up at the drone as it slowly rotated ten feet above the Art Club table and displays. Whether it was a display of dominance or a cry for attention Jon really couldn't tell but he could pinpoint exactly who was piloting the noisy craft. Allison 'Ally' Branch...Ashford's own eSports prodigy and attention sponge. She really hammed up the 'goth girl gamer' vibe and used it to deflect any kind of responsibility for her generally bad behavior as just 'edgy humor'. Jon watched the drone dip and move as if it were going to 'accidentally' ram into parts of the art displays around the club tables. She was baiting him. Perhaps Jon had gotten back on Ally's radar after the incident with Joe during the Assembly. Maybe it was just plain bad luck that the Art Club and Robotics had been placed close to each other. Either way, getting noticed by Ally was always more trouble than it was worth and definitely going to make senior year more of a pain in the ass.

On the upside, though, it seemed like the incoming freshman class were more hobby-minded than in past years. Lots more new students came by the Art Club table and a more diverse crowd at that. Having a community seemed to be pretty important to the new freshman class, at least as much as finding an 'identity' to latch onto. That was a pleasant and welcome surprise!

Kyle looked around the room and was both impressed and amused. The student council had clearly put a lot of though into the preparations for today, the effort paid off. The booths were are clearly labeled and easily identified from almost any angle allowing any interested freshmen to easily locate where to go to find their interests. What had not been taken into account was just how chaotic and childish freshmen could be.

The swarming masses of excited freshmen were clearly only partially listening to their assigned guides/mentors. Many handled it nicely, a simple exertion of authority, assertive personality, or persuasion allowed the seniors to corral their overexcited wards. However others had less luck. Kyle noticed that some of the likely carefully organized tour groups were dissolving or merging. Some seniors only had one or two, while others had over 10 and were getting overwhelmed by the sheer disinterest of the teens they were supposed to be helping.

Noting one group of unusual size Kyle spotted Zane, who he had shared a class with last year, and some other senior he didn't recognize trying to keep what was clearly at least their two groups and some others that had come together. The group was dominated by about a dozen girls that were clearly all good friends who had gotten together despite likely being split into multiple groups for the tours. Getting up from where he sat Kyle made his way to the group and slid up next to Zane.

"Looks like your guys got steamrolled" he comments to Zane, with an amused tone. Zane just responded with a glare but before he could say anything Kyle offered to help out. After a bit of negotiation between Kyle and the two group leaders, a much smaller group set out with Kyle in the lead and the students who wanted to check out other clubs and activities that they would never likely see if they remained with the group now driven by the girls clique.

Walking from booth to booth and explaining things as needed Kyle though this smaller group wasn't too bad. Kyle always operated better with smaller groups and had a tendency to hang out with either younger or older people so he began to relax a bit and get into the role of tour guide and advisor. That is until he spotted Glitch.

He had left the drone locked up at home to avoid any drama on the first day but somehow it had gotten itself all the way to the school and by the look of things it was executing a search pattern, probably for Kyle. He still did not know what was going on with the thing but it had often showed up and followed Kyle around over the summer. Fortunately he had taken to keeping a remote with himself at all times. Whipping it out he activated the remote and set it to tether the drone while the kids were distracted. With a sigh of relief he noted that Glitch responded quickly and actually complied, something that did not always happen.

Now with the drone and three freshmen in tow Kyle made his way around the campus, picking up one of the official senior guide sheets that someone had set down and apparently forgotten at one of the booths. Not quite what he had planned on doing but deciding to make the best of it since he acted on the impulse to help out, Kyle chatted with the three younger student as they walked around the campus, visiting places of interest to them and that Kyle, or the guide sheet, thought they should know about.

"Hands off, Jake! These ones are mine!" Minsoo says, reaching for some freshies with some exaggerated friendliness. Her and Jake had to fight over the newbies, and this year seemed to be going well for the track runners. It was friendly competition, until the inevitable question of running through cow-shit pocked fields arises from some well-meaning freshman.

"Hey, have you seen Sarah? She’s supposed to be here by now." the athlete asks her rival, checking her sports watch - and not for the first time. Sarah was supposed to help wrangle the new sign ups away from Jake’s table with Minsoo, but so far there was no sign of her.

Multi-Purpose Hall

Myra's gaze landed on Nina only for a split second, for while Nina appeared more affirmed, there was someone else in the periphery of her vision who seemed to cringe when they heard Myra's less-than welcoming retort to Logan. Myra as a senior, knew she really ought to have known better, but Logan was certainly too smug for his own good. The person Myra noticed was an auburn-haired freshie, curls in pigtails, whose cheery smile alongside her three friends seemed to fade as she hesitated to approach the Math Club booth. Myra was confident that a few choice words from her would allay this girl's trepidation, but she had to take the initiative to approach her quickly before the young one retreated into the safety of the buzzing crowd.

It was 2.58pm on the hall clock. When you turn to interact with the girl, you find that --

The Tech / Robotics Club zone saw a busy surge in excitable freshmen, enough for Kyle to peel some off Zane's throng. Kyle had to admit that Zane was much more a whiz at engineering and building drone models than Kyle, but when it came to people, Zane simply couldn't assemble them together as effectively. Kyle led a group over to the Art Club displays where he spotted Jonathan being way more socially engaged with the young ones than he ever was in their class. Jonathan had covered for him earlier, and it seemed only right for Kyle to return the favour; it was obvious that goth gamer Ally was using her drone to mess around with the exhibits. Surely Kyle could whisk up something, maybe with Glitch's help, to drive her drone away? In the corner of his eye he saw a quartet of girls latch on to his tour group, led by an auburn-haired girl in curly pigtails, hi-top sneakers, and a cheery smile. Jonathan spotted Kyle's group nearing his displays, but he also saw Ally's drone seeming to be on a flight path aimed directly at the pigtailed girl.

It was 2.58pm on the hall clock. When you turn to intervene with the girl, you find that --

Gym

Joe had chosen the more boisterous of the two venues to start his own personal tour. He had arrived too late in the semester last year to commit meaningfully to some of these extra-curricular activities, and in all honesty he felt torn between his physical development, deeply tied to the Way that he had begun to practice, and his deep abiding interest in the things of the past. The set-up of all the booths was pitched at those three years his junior with their over-bright designs, cringey slogans and fellow enthusiastic seniors 'selling' at the top of their lungs as sportspeople do. Joe expected the multi-purpose hall upstairs to carry the same orientation atmosphere. He had no doubt his own sister would find these way more stimulating.

Thankfully he spotted a familiar face; Minsoo, at the Athletics booth, was his classmate, and she looked like she was about to lead a group of students out of the gym, and presumably to the outdoor track, for tryouts. Minsoo looked like she was all about to challenge her freshie juniors to a little race to the track to see who got there first, although Joe caught her face to reveal a flash of annoyance when Minsoo checked her watch. For Minsoo was waiting for Sarah to relieve her duty at the booth, but Sarah was nowhere to be seen.

What Minsoo did spot though as she craned her neck were a quartet of girls, led by an auburn-hair girl in curly pigtails and high-tops. Not quite the right running shoes, but seemingy ready to join Minsoo without having inquired at the booth yet. Would Minsoo stop them from joining in? Joe saw them too, and wondered if he should say hi to Minsoo before she turned her attention to the girls.

It was 2.58pm on the gym clock. When you turn to pay attention to the girl, you find that --

Joe catches Minsoo’s look of searching annoyance; he doesn’t know what’s annoying her, but she apparently has her hands full, so he’ll simply jog up beside her… "Minsoo! Need a hand?"

Torrance joined the finishing setup for a couple booths for clubs he was a part of. Technically. He always helped with whatever activity the group was participating in, but was never really a part of the group, just a little apart. It's not thst he was disliked just... faded into the background of peoples memory or consciousness. He had the benefit of only having a partial in-class schedule this year and last, and being able to use that time for clubs, having tested out of most of the classes he had desired to.
He never really took the speaking seat at any of the booths, and noone thought to ask him to, but they were thankful for the help. While both were technically clubs, the science club wasnt much more than a group study hall with intermittent projects. The programming club was an actual club with events and an competition each semester.

Spotting Jonathan being harassed leaves a sour taste in Kyles mouth, he never did like bullies of any sort, but he then smiles to himself as an amusing thought crosses his mind as he flips out his remote and scrolls a moment before toggling a subroutine to activates as he directs Glitches camera first to Jonathan then to Ally. Smiling he puts away the remote and resumes guiding the kids towards the art booth and pointing out some of the exhibits he finds interesting. He is curious about the newcomers but figures pointing it out will just cause them to react. Better to just let it happen so long as the girls don't cause trouble. Mixed groups can make boys behave better or act out. Chucking again to himself he decides to wait and see.

He is mostly on auto-pilot as far as the art booth in concerned and quickly draws over one of the senior art students to give their shpeel as his attention is on the drones and Ally. He has designated Jonathan as Glitches base and Ally as the goal with the other drone as both the opponent and "ball" and engaged Glitches soccer program. While glitch didn't always obey, it did excel at games and given the option would always play one. Kyle just hopped he had set the parameters correctly so Glitch would fly close but not actually hit the other drone. That could cause problems, but with the stage set he was curious to see how it turned out.

Plus this seemed like a great time to try and flex a bit of his new ability. Kyler visualized the entire thing and focused as he pressed a few buttons on the remote hidden in his pocket to interfere with Allys drone controls, just a bit, to make the angle, just right. If this worked properly he bet he could get Ally to "over steer" her own drone, with a bit of nudging at the opportune moment, right into some of the streamers strung around the place and . . . Well the important thing is that it was all just a 'random accident' and if it helped Joe, all the better.

Hello there... Myra is trying center herself

Jonathan was holding an impromptu Q&A from the group if incoming freshmen about the types of art classes Ashford High offered and whether the Art Club took regular outings to the various museums nearby in the city. He did his best to answer the thousand and one questions the new class seemed to have, fielding them pretty much by himself given the lack of help from the others manning the booth. Introspective artists tended not to do well with public speaking... That sort of thing never bothered Jonathan much, if at all, and it generally fell to him to be the spokesperson where the Art Club was involved.

He leaned back on the table in front of the Art Club tent, arms folded as he answered questions from the freshmen milling around the displays. He kept one eye and ear on the freshmen and another on the drone buzzing about. Ally was cagey and crafty about when she caused trouble; careful to to terrorize the freshmen but to distract them when Jonathan was talking and threatening the displays when only he was watching. The 'cat & mouse' attention seeking behavior from Ally & her drone was something that Jonathan could metaphorically let roll off his back. The sudden drone dive at the freshman in pigtails and her friends was not...

Unaware that Kyle had programmed his own drone to run interference and more concerned with Pigtails, Jonathan did the only thing that came to mind. Grabbing a tarp from the table next to him, he tossed it at the drone to catch it in the plastic sheet emblazoned with the Ashford school colors and keep it from plowing into the small crowd of freshman. The plastic sheet barely captured the buzzing drone, forcing it to the ground but just barely... The little machine struggled under the tarp, threatening to somehow free itself and escape. Jonathan rushed over the secure the tarp, and the drone, to the ground. "You guys okay?" he asked the pigtailed girl and her friends. He flashed them a reassuring smile as he folded the drone up into the tarp and picked the bundle up.

"Hey, that trick was sick...grabbing it outta the air like that." one of the freshmen boys remarked amongst hesitant giggles.

"For my next trick, Imma make that drone disappear." he meant that he was about to take it back to Ally and the Robotics Club. The drone had ceased buzzing inside the tarp, whether because of signal loss or to preserve the electric motors or more delicate parts, so Jonathan reached inside the tarp to retrieve it.

Wren had walked with Joe to the multi-purpose hall, pointing out where different clubs had set up their booths - Politicas over there, Student Librarian stand near the math tables. He seemed to be figuring out what interested him, so she left him to explore and headed to the stage section where the music tables were set up. The elevation gave her a bit of distance from the mass of freshmen flooding the hall below. She unlocked practice rooms, checked equipment, arranged flyers about band and chorus schedules. Simple tasks. Manageable.

Something going well:
The one-on-one conversations were working. When freshmen wandered over individually or in pairs, actually interested in music rather than just checking boxes, Wren could handle that. She'd shown three different students the practice rooms, demonstrated the upright piano for a quiet girl who admitted she'd been taking lessons for years, helped a nervous boy figure out if he wanted guitar or bass. Small groups. Genuine questions. Simple answers about schedules and auditions and whether you needed to read music to join. That she could do. A freshman with dark curls and careful hands had just finished playing a few bars of something classical on the piano. "That's really good," Wren said, and meant it. "You should definitely audition for ensemble." The girl smiled, relieved, and Wren felt something settle. This part was okay. This part made sense.

Something not going smoothly:
But the multi-purpose hall was getting louder. More students arriving. More voices layering over each other. The robotics club's drones buzzing overhead. Someone's phone blasting music from the art corner. The basketball game in the gym below creating rhythmic thuds that traveled through the floor. And underneath it all - that hum. The one that had been following her since summer. The one that had crystallized in the auditorium when she'd put her headphones on. It was getting harder to ignore.

Wren's hand drifted to her headphones, still around her neck. She wanted to pull them on, create that bubble of silence, but she was supposed to be helping freshmen. Being normal. Doing her job. The hum built. Not louder - deeper. Like the building itself was resonating at a frequency just below hearing, and her entire body was picking it up. She pressed her palm against the stage floor for a moment, trying to ground herself. Breathed carefully. Counted beats like she would when keeping time. *Just sensory overload. Just too many people. Just first-day chaos.* But her hands were starting to shake, and the careful normalcy she'd been maintaining all afternoon was fraying at the edges.

Just like earlier in the auditorium when Torrance watched and evaluated Joe's dizzy spell correctly but did not see the need to commit to and express an opinion, at the orientation booths Torrance contributed where he saw fit but still stood detached from actually committing to pitching and canvassing. So while he still stood near the row with all the science and tech-related booths, none of the freshmen, and there were certainly a whole swarm of them, noticed him enough to approach him.

"It's that RBF of yours Torrance, you gotta lighten up!" Jennifer chuckled as she stepped around him to speak with two nerdy-looking boys who made a beeline for the Info Tech Club booth. But truly, no one approach him ...

... until a group of four girls made their way in his general direction. Three of them were oblivious to him, but the one in front, an auburn-haired girl with curly pigtails and hi-top sneakers, looked him straight in the eyes as she skipped forward, as if she wanted to speak only with him.

It was 2.58pm on the hall clock. When you contemplate whether to speak with the girl, you find that ...

Wren's connections with those who approached the music booth were genuine. The younger ones who came forward were truly passionate about their skill, and spoke with their craft in a way that transcended words. If she were freer, she would have loved to sit down and jam with some of them, but today it was way more important to answer their questions, show them the facilities, and help manage the slots for those who wanted to audition.

But the crowd felt never-ending. The cohort intake was four hundred students, and while they came in waves downstairs in the gym and also up here, and even though they had spread themselves out throughout the hall, the stimuli was incessant, the queues were constant, the questions were enthusiastic and never-ending. Wren couldn't see herself shirking her responsibility, so when she saw a quartet of girls approaching, with the one in front, an auburn-haired girl with curly pigtails and hi-top sneakers, sliding herself onto the piano seat and her three friends standing around her, Wren figured engaging them in conversation wouldn't be so pressurising as they seemed to be self-sufficient. Perhaps some moments of shared playing could help her centre herself.

It was 2.58pm on the hall clock. When you see the girl about the place her hands on the keyboard, you find that ...

Torrance introduced himself to the auburn curly-haired girl and started introducing the club, and to his surprise it went well. It helped that she was genuinly already interested in the club, having already decided to try out computer and programming options before she started today.
But she smiled, seemed interested, asked questions, and Torrance found himself relaxing. One of her friends asked a question and he was able to answer that too. Maybe he wasn't and innate leader or presenter, but he really (really) knew what he was talking about, and sometimes just that and being friendly was enough.
He got a couple people signed up.

"I never did beliiiiieveee in the ways of magic…" Minsoo sings to herself, as she checks the sign up sheet one final time. Singing was a good way to keep her mind off of Sarah, and her being late.

If you’re not first, you’re last… came to mind.

She spots Joe through the crowd and can only blow a puff of air up at her own fringe, cooling her forehead slightly and showing her exasperation. Then she rounds on the girls looking to attend the fun-race/test.

"Hiii!" she says, trying to be as chirpy as she can muster. "I don’t see your names on the sheet. Are you hoping to sign up?" she says, beaming a smile and passing them the sign up sheet and pen.

Wren saw the auburn-haired girl slide onto the piano bench, her three friends clustering around. Another group wanting to try the instruments. The girl's hands hovered over the keys, and instead of launching into the standard orientation speech, Wren moved to sit beside her on the bench. Music worked better than words anyway. Wren looks over to the girl briefly, nods affirmative to let her get started and then chimes in.

Simultaneously,

Myra greeted the girl. "Hi, I'm Emily -"

Torrance greeted the girl. Hi, I'm Emily -"

Minsoo greeted the girl. "Hi, I'm E-" Joe wanted to give Minsoo a hand, but mistimed his approach to awkwardly interrupt Minsoo just as she greeted the girl.

Wren sat next to the girl and nodded, hearing her friends address the girl as Emily, and then proceeded to play a jarring wrong note.

Jonathan trapped the the drone with the tarp after nearly missing it. Kyle simultaneously managed to hack into the drone to render it inert. The net result of this was that the drone was no longer in a collision course with the girl, who turned to smile at both of them. "Thank you, I'm Emily -"

And then,

the massive clock in the multi-purpose hall and the gym stopped. Not just the hands - the entire mechanism seemed to freeze. For a heartbeat, everything was silent.

Then the world tore. The world as you understood it.

All the lights went out, plunging the room into near darkness. A few kids screamed from the suddenness, but most of them stood bewildered in a babble of confusion. An adult voice, one of the teachers no doubt around to help oversee everything, said something about a power trip, and urgent voices seemed to try to call out of someone to rectify the situation. Some quick-thinking students pulled out their phones to use as torchlights, before exclaiming in discovery that their phones were similarly blacked out.And then it was over. The clock ticked. The lights steadied. Students looked around, confused but already rationalising: "Did the power flicker?" "Someone overloaded their booth!" "Earthquake?" "Whoa, weird dizziness." "Maybe it's the flu! What are you talking about?" The room was still chaotic, with people milling to figure things out, and some teachers continuing to scramble to ascertain if everything was okay.

But you know. Something happened. Something real.

You know, because the girl you thought you were talking to or about to talk to --

-- you weren't. She wasn't there.

Torrance braces himself against the table. Everything is happening all together, as if a film was stuck and bunchibg up but still projecting. Instead of passing by they all pressed in on eachother, not bunching but melding, superimposing and blending into one thing. A moment that stretches forever. A leaf on a river, unchanging as everything else flows. The school, a snapshot unchanging around him for years, but not years because nothing passes.
And then everything returns to normal.
He feels like he should need to sit down, take a breath, but he doesn't because nothing happened to him. Physically, he is fine and nothing, so much nothing, happened.

Something loomed large just behind Minsoo’s eyes. A being, or creature or… something alive, she thought, filled her mind. It… She… was there, and they were aware of each other…

Then the lights are back, and the brightness drives the thing from her mind for a second. Adjusting to the light, she wobbles, and then puts on a brave face. A face that told the Freshies that there was nothing to worry about:

"Oh! Wow! I guess someone didn’t pay the bill this month, huh?" she jokes, and then realizes that at least one of the girls wasn’t there.

First Sarah, and now this Freshie.

"Where’s your friend?" she asks the rest of the quartet, even as she pulls out her own phone.

"Did she have second thoughts?" she says, keeping things light. Her fingers work furiously on the phone.

Chat: 🏫💔

Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.

At first Kyle simply blinks but then a seed of concern begins to grow. If Kyle can do strange things then the world is stranger than what he though it was growing up. That means there are things in the world that very likely can do what he can do, and probably more, but have never mad it into the general awareness. Instantly thoughts of monsters, legends, myths, folklore, flip through his mind before he pulls his mind back to the here and now.

Did that thing on the net do something? Where did that girl Emily go?

Instantly pulling back to himself the bit of power he had extended to mess with the drone Kyle instead shifts over to being as normal as possible while extending his new, and still growing senses to try and at least figure out is there is anything odd or out of place in the immediate area, is distance and location actually mean anything. He also searches the area to see if Emily just got lost in the crowd during the blackout or got knocked over. Great, who knows if reality and physics are even what he thought they were. Kyle is way in over his head. He really should have done more research when this whole thing got started.

Pulling out his phone he checks the local networks and the tracker he had running in the background. Noticing the post by 'Mac' he wonders how long this event will keep the chat groups busy and makes a note to keep tabs on them. Some times bits of actual facts some how make it in with all the opinions, at least until the chat threads get distracted.

Myra have had a strange morning. First it was the assembly and the snake that connected Joe with... something, and now these symbols. She has a feeling that this might also be a hallucination. Something she don't want to discuss with any random person.

She grabs her notebook and starts to sketch out all the symbols that she can remember.
She knows them, but from where? She is sure that she has seen some of them before. At home perhaps?
Once she is sure that she havent forgotten any symbol, she looks up to apologise to the girl... Emily?

Hey, where did she go? Emily? She was just here before the poweroutage.

Myra is looking through the crowd, looking for Emily, but also looking at people in general. Is anyone examining the spot of the wall with the large complex symbol she is pretty sure she copied down wrong?

The moment the lights went out, the hum became unbearable.

Five hundred people in the hall - but Wren could sense thousands. Presences layering over each other, frequencies she couldn't name, all of them pressing against her at once. She couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Just perceive - all of it overwhelming, undeniable.

Then the lights came back.

The first thing Wren noticed was the piano. The wrong note she'd played - it was still sounding. Still resonating, impossible and clear, like time had stopped for everything except that one dissonant tone. Her hands were still on the keys. Emily wasn't beside her anymore. The bench was empty. Had been empty?

Wren pulled her hands back, pressed them against her thighs to stop the shaking. Around her, students were talking - power flicker, earthquake, dizzy spell. But that note was still ringing, and Emily had been right there. And now she wasn't.

Torrance looks at the small void in the crowd where a girl just stood. He tries to sesrch out what happened to her, if there was a traceable connection to what just happened. What might be the causality here. Or was the expierence strong enough to cause him to miss her leaving completly.

Joe’s embarrassment at messing up another social interaction would normally feel like a slap in the face, but in comparison to whatever else is going on it’s a puff of wind on his cheek, barely noticeable.
Something happened with everyone’s minds, except mine. Did I resist something without knowing it, or was I deliberately omitted from something that was otherwise intended to affect everyone else? That girl with the auburn curls - what happened to her? He recalls that Mind encompasses perception, and hence certain types of illusion.
Is it an illusion that she’s vanished?
Or an illusion that she was ever here?
No, neither of them makes sense. I was excluded; so if her disappearance was an illusion then I’d still perceive her; and if she was an illusion all along I’d never have seen her at all. Therefore, she was -is?- real on some level, and so was her disappearance…
So if she actually disappeared, there was a cause. It may have been deliberately triggered, by herself or parties unknown; or it may have been something passive, tied to a place and/or time.
Could it be that something quite different happened to her, and the illusion was an attempt to cover it up? If that was the idea, it didn’t work very well, did it?

The strange note wouldn't stop.

Wren placed her hands back on the piano keys. She started playing - not a piece, just individual notes. A harmonic tone, then a dissonant one. Melodic, then jarring. Loud, then soft. Each time, she listened to the echo. Not just how it sounded in the hall, but how it resonated through the instrument itself, through the space around her. Using the piano to sense what was vibrating beneath the surface of reality.

>>>Once is an Anomaly.
Twice is a Coincidence.
Three Times is a Pattern.

>>>Mortality. It was something Jonathan had been acquainted with since he was a young child. The finite finality of all things had been with him from the moment he learned his parents had died. Been killed, even though everyone avoided saying it. Most people are blessed to only be visited by Death in tangential ways. The passing of a pet, the graveside visitation of family they barely knew... The ones that got a personal introduction to Death were irrevocably changed.

>>>The power outage was the third odd incident in the day and that put things squarely into the 'pattern' category. It might've been a prank, might've been overloaded wiring, might've been just plain bad luck and a tree limb snapped a power line... Jonathan's sudden insight into the ultimate fates of the 500 or so students around him was certainly nothing explicable by any reasonable explanation beyond hallucinations. Jonathan knew what he'd experienced was beyond rational but couldn't be a hallucination. It had to be some Final Destination kind of premonition between ticks of the clock...
>>>As the lights came back on the vision stick with him, especially the students whose dates were today . And the pigtailed girl? Where was she? The drone had been heading right for her an now she'd vanished. Gone. Kyle was right beside her and he'd just spoken to her a light flicker ago.
>>>Craning his head around to look for Emily, that was her name right? She'd said do right before she... disappeared, right? He also looked for the other two students whose time was today to see if they were still here. He could almost feel the tug of their metaphorical hourglasses running out if he just opened himself up a little...

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.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.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. 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?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. 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?

Something is going on... She had seen these symbols before, but there were something to get into at some later time.
At this very moment, she is more concerned with Vice-Principal Marston. He saw the symbols too, she is sure of it. What does he know?
Also: Is anyone hurt?

Where is Emily? The girl who was just here?
Myra looks under the table and around the booths. Was she caught up in the panic rush when the power went?
Oi! Cass! Did you see the Emily girl who was just here before the blackout?
Cass might be the teachers dauther, a snob and perfectionist, but right now she is also a known quantity. While their relationship has never been warm, they have never been hostile to eachother.
And since Cass had the booth across from Myra she might have seen something.

Slightly disconcerted and excited as being able to do this without his phone, Kyle is excited and not just a bit curious. But things are definitely off, or is it just that they have always been like this and he was just never aware or forgot . . . Hearing calls about Emily he locks onto Myra. She knows. Edging over closer to he he comments

"I saw Emily come in but she disappeared after the blackout. The lights wern't out that long, she couldn't have left the room." and waves back along the path Emily had arrived by and gives a slight emphasis on 'disappeared' as he looks around as well, but keeps an eye on Myra to gauge her reaction.

"I can try and see if anyone outside saw her leave or knows more about her, but I can't just ditch the freshmen." he nods at the younger students and with a implication of asking for help to wrangle the freshmen without directly asking.

Drawn to follow the 'track' of whatever Kyle first looks around to see if anyone else seems to be looking at things not clearly present or along the path of the track. He really want to follow and see where it leads but doesn't want to abandon the freshmen, especially since the group grew after he split it off.

Torrance taps his fingers in time with the analog wall clock that hangs off to the side wall, despite having digital clocks installd it remains a remnant. A remnant. Time. Ticking. Something missed.
Tap. Tick. Tap. Tick.
Just trying to feel out something missed, something that is left over or something that sliped between the ticks of the clock.

Wren's hands stilled on the keys. The discord was real - she'd sensed it through the piano's echo, felt the wrongness radiating from multiple points in the hall. And Daniela was right there, close enough to see, struggling to hold back tears.

Wren stood up from the piano bench. Her legs felt unsteady, but she moved anyway, crossing toward the Editorial Wing booth. She didn't know what she'd say. Didn't know if Daniela had felt what she'd felt. But something impossible had just happened, and Daniela was clearly not okay.

"Hey," Wren said quietly when she got close enough. "Are you... what happened?"

WiFi is out. Great… the girl thinks, as she waits for her messaging service to tell her that the text had gone through.

Maybe the girls hadn’t come as a group then. She’d lumped them in as friends, when really they were two different parties and walking up at once. A natural kind of mix up when new faces and a new year were all mixing together!

"Oh. Are you guys signing up then? We’ll head out in a minute, I just need to check something!" she says, as she walks behind the booth, and stoops down behind the table cloth where she can’t immediately be seen.

She tries to focus her mind on that entity she saw in the basement. Was that Emily? Was that something else?…

>>>The sense of unease, of wrongness pervaded the faces of the students around Jonathan, both freshmen and seniors. Something was wrong, even if no one could exactly put their finger on what it was... He, himself, suddenly felt the weight of eyes on him as if something or someone had suddenly been made aware of his existence.
>>> Confusion still reigned in the hall even as the school staff began appearing to investigate and mollify the situation. One mystery remained, the missing girl. Emily.
>>> Jonathan's hands reached back behind him to grab whatever supplies the club had present on the table and flipped around one of his canvases. Practiced hands flew over the rough media, sketching the face of the disappeared girl before memory of her faded. They'd only met for a moment and he didn't want to lose the recollection of her. He had to have something concrete he could show others that might jog their memory of her.

A number of thoughts jostle for attention in Joe’s head. A girl has better things to do than disappear in the middle of a conversation, so there’s something weird going on. Unless maybe she’s like me and her inner other went off at half-cock? Doubtful; that illusion, if that’s what it was, was very broadly focused. I couldn’t do anything remotely that ambitious if I wanted to. So, it seems unlikely that she did that to herself.
A nasty thought occurs.
Was she actually real? There’s weird stuff happening all of a sudden; if someone were fishing for Awakened or potentially Awakened people, throwing a sufficiently odd occurrence in as a stimulus might provoke such a one to give themselves away; rather as I’m afraid I may have done… except I remembered the warnings the first time and kept my response mundane; then my inner other cut loose by itself, and they haven’t come for me yet.
Where are those two?
Where’s Em?
Joe fishes out his phone, sends a text to his sister. Power blip; are you ok? It takes an age to send. For once Joe doesn’t mind. It’s a cover. Absently, he steps forward into the space where the girl with the auburn curls disappeared. One hand is holding his phone, but with the other one finger is rhythmically tapping the pulse point on his other wrist. Joe calms his mind, lets the hubbub of talk and text rise around him, lets it fade to the edges of his awareness as his own sense moves inward. He is softly tapping out a pulse rhythm not his own, probing for a recent match in this space where he recently thought someone was, feeling through his inner other for the fading echo of another pulse; was there another actual person here a moment ago?

Multi-Purpose Hall

With the sketches safely in her book, Myra found Cassandra reaching for the two freshmen who had ducked under their booths, "Are you okay? It’s safe, you can come out. Teachers are on their way." Even under situations of distress, Cass was composed and instinctively took charge. After all she did win a resounding vote for council president. At Myra’s words Cass raised her head and their gazes met. There was a split second of wordlessness between them which spoke louder than words. In that instant, Myra was sure that Cass understood something as well. But did she dare to broach the subject of the strangeness? Could she trust the daughter of one of the staff members, especially after having noticed Marston looking at her?

That was the moment Kyle crossed over, clearly catching Myra’s concerned question about Emily. There was time later to figure out the discrepancy how both Kyle and Myra had separately interacted with the girl freshie. He was still worried for the safety of the freshmen following him, though from the looks of it there was general consternation throughout. Whatever happened seemed to have frazzled everyone in some way or other, freshman and senior alike. But he was now certain that Myra noticed something amiss as well when she heard his question."You ok?" It was Sera Knowles again, who had the uncanny ability to find herself next to Torrance without him realising it. Torrance had curtly ignored her when she was teasing him earlier for standing motionlessly while watching Joe’s fainting spell. Now she sought him out again as he stood there, staring at the large old clock that hung on the wall. It read 2.58pm, although Torrance had just checked his own watch to establish that it was already 3pm, two minutes since he spoke with Emily. He looked at his watch again to be sure, and then looked back up. The minute hand was at the 12 position. It now read 3pm. "Hey, everything okay?" Sera repeated with more concern in her voice. There were still a couple of kids near the rows of booths when Wren came down, but they were too preoccupied with their own stress to recognise that Daniela had retreated into a corner blocked by the booth decorations. Wren headed straight for her, and Daniela looked up when she approached, her eyes were wide and wild, tears streaming down unrestrainedly, and she was muttering something very softly while biting her lower lip. Wren got close enough to put a comforting arm around Daniela, close enough for her to hear Daniela mumble surely the most unrelated thing to what had just happened in the hall: "Alex. Where’s Alex?" She could only mean their classmate Alex Vance, who did not come to school today.Jonathan’s next action was nothing short of prescient. Zarah who was next to him must’ve thought him befuddled when he made a grab for pencils and the nearest canvas whilst everyone else was caught up in the hubbub of the blackout, but somehow Jonathan knew he daren’t trust his memory, nor anyone else’s for that matter, for a bizarre occurrence as this. He blitzed through his sketch needing to pause nor think, and the picture that formed was a highly detailed likeness of Emily, unnervingly realistic. Jonathan drew on sheer instinct, and it was only when he completed it that he saw that he had shaded multiple portraits of her in the background. Teachers were now on site. Vice-Principal Marston was quickest to arrive, as Myra well knew, and she could feel Cass’ eyes still on her. Dr Veritas, the Chemistry Head and also care counsellor, was there next with four of the form teachers of the freshmen classes, who began to spread out to speak with various pockets of students. Kyle and Torrance recognised Mr Chase, who came in with Professor Strom some moments later. Chase was headed their way, but Strom stormed towards Veritas instead as if he had something urgent to say that could not wait.

Will anyone approach the teachers to describe what happened in the room, or to yourselves? Or will you endeavour to keep it quiet?



Gymnasium

The anxious girls looked bewildered that Minsoo was still enthusiastically talking about sign-ups at a time like this, for they were too caught up with themselves to realise that Minsoo was making her exit. Joe saw that she stepped away even as he stepped forward to where the girls were.

The network outage seemed to have stabilised for Minsoo’s phone finally buzzed back, with Sabrina first to reply in the class chat, insane in the hall! gym 2? Joe’s phone also pinged a reply, in the hall, things went weird dark, m ok, wru??

But both Joe and Minsoo didn’t quite get to their phones just yet. Something more pressing preoccupied them. The moment Joe stood at the spot where Emily had stood, he set aside the thought of his sister of the same name. This other Emily was … just as real. He could sense she was alive. Even if she did disappear as if she were an illusion. In fact, Joe felt that she was very alive, if that made any sense at all. More alive? More lives? The sensation was spiritual, intense.

Minsoo was about to do something similar, to see if she could sense again the darkness she perceived somewhere in school. The traumatising appearance of the image was as far removed from Emily as Minsoo could rationalise. But the inexplicable disappearance of a freshie was surely as traumatisingly associative. Perhaps Minsoo could make a connection.

Teachers were now onsite. Coach Corbin must’ve flown in in double quick time from wherever he was, and right behind him was track coach Mendes. She began to get a couple of the older students to group the freshies and do a headcount, while Corbin himself made his rounds to check on the seniors at each booth. He moved as a teacher focussed solely on the safety of all students, and was seconds away from where Joe and Minsoo were still concentrating on their own business. Would they think of telling him about had happened? Or would continue what they were doing and risk being noticed?

"Alex Vance?" Wren sat down next to Daniela. "I think he didn't attend school today."

"What did you see, Daniela, what did just happen?" Wren asked, keeping her voice calm.

Myra and Cass would never been BFF's, their priorities were just too different. That doesn't mean that they could not respect each other's skillsets - even if misguided.

In this case, they are both seniors and some freshmen got spooked during the blackout and are now missing. They should be able to meet at this challenge.

Myra checks her phone and find the class group chat

Class Chat:
Mac: Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.
Myra: Power went out everywhere, it seems. A freshman called "Emily Walsh" is missing. Last seen in the multipurpuse hall by the library/math club stand. Lot of weird stuff is going on.

"Yeah just... losing time." He didn't think there were any more clues to what just happened to be found now, and staying distracted from what was going on wouldnt help. "Just a weird day." Seeing that noone else (at least noone near him) was reacting to the missing girl or slipped time he wasn't going bring it up.

Class Chat:
Mac: Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.
Myra: Power went out everywhere, it seems. A freshman called "Emily Walsh" is missing. Last seen in the multipurpose hall by the library/math club stand. Lot of weird stuff is going on.
Wyck: the missing freshman girl was with us at the Art Club table when the lights went out, not at the math table.

>>> Satisfied that he'd gotten the pigtailed girl's image committed to physical media, Jonathan checked his phone as a stream of push notifications flooded in after the lights had come back on. The messages from the other seniors in the class chat flashed by at breakneck speed but the message from Myra about where Emily had been when the lights went out was clearly wrong and if she was going to be found getting the current information out there was important.

As the coaches rushed around to gather up the students, Minsoo focuses harder on that feeling she’d had from the basement. Maybe something had reached out and taken Emily… somehow removed her from her friends’ memories…

Hurriedly, before she was tapped on the shoulder and asked to line up, she focuses her thoughts on that something that might be living somewhere deep below…

Myra stares in disbeliefe at her phone and then responds.
Class Chat:
Mac: Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.
Myra: Power went out everywhere, it seems. A freshman called "Emily Walsh" is missing. Last seen in the multipurpose hall by the library/math club stand. Lot of weird stuff is going on.
Wyck: the missing freshman girl was with us at the Art Club table when the lights went out, not at the math table.
Myra: No she was not. I was speaking with Emily as the blackout happened. Are there more than one Emily missing?

Class Chat:
Mac: Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.
Myra: Power went out everywhere, it seems. A freshman called "Emily Walsh" is missing. Last seen in the multipurpose hall by the library/math club stand. Lot of weird stuff is going on.
Wyck: the missing freshman girl was with us at the Art Club table when the lights went out, not at the math table.
Myra: No she was not. I was speaking with Emily as the blackout happened. Are there more than one Emily missing?
Wyck: The "Emily" here wore pigtails. Pretty sure she said her last name was "Walsh". She was getting buzzed by a Robotics Team drone. Was talking to her when the lights went out. Twins??

Torrance check his phone for the notification feom the class chat, which is unusuall since he muted that whole chat a year ago and happens to catch the conversation in question.
Class Chat:
Myra: No she was not. I was speaking with Emily as the blackout happened. Are there more than one Emily missing?
Wyck: The "Emily" here wore pigtails. Pretty sure she said her last name was "Walsh". She was getting buzzed by a Robotics Team drone. Was talking to her when the lights went out. Twins??
Torrance: The same girl was at the programmer's club booth. Does anyone but those that noticed here here seem to be reacting to someone missing? She came here with friends but they do not seem to be looking for her or reacting to her dissapearance. Her belongings seem to be held by another girl as is always there.

Kyle looks at his phone which has been pinning non stop and notices some posts that seem relevant
Class Chat:
Mac: Guys, wth was that? Power went out in the gym? Weird.
...
Myra: No she was not. I was speaking with Emily as the blackout happened. Are there more than one Emily missing?
...
Wyck: The "Emily" here wore pigtails. Pretty sure she said her last name was "Walsh". She was getting buzzed by a Robotics Team drone. Was talking to her when the lights went out. Twins??
...
Myra: No she was not. I was speaking with Emily as the blackout happened. Are there more than one Emily missing?
...
Torrance: The same girl was at the programmer's club booth. Does anyone but those that noticed here here seem to be reacting to someone missing? She came here with friends but they do not seem to be looking for her or reacting to her disappearance. Her belongings seem to be held by another girl as is always there.


Not sure what is going on, Kyle does not feel the need to get into it just yet. Feigning to have not noticed Mr Chase heading his way Kyle looks to the others around him and mixes in with the throng of other teens as he wanders towards the exit, following the trail he somehow noticed in connection to Emily.

Marston made an announcement, first at the multi-purpose hall, and then subsequently at the gymnasium hall one floor below.

"Dear students, this is Vice-Principal Marston. There is a minor electrical issue in this gymnasium block. Power has been restored and everyone is safe. We will close this Orientation Showcase early as an added precaution so that we can conduct a more thorough safety check. I commend everyone for remaining calm and well-behaved.

First years, your form teachers will usher you to your classrooms for an end-of-day briefing before dismissing you. Seniors, well-done for organising such an enriching experience for your juniors. You may leave your booths and setups as they are today; we will pack up tomorrow. Today you are also dismissed early." His last concession appeared to have pleased him, and he smiled encouragingly at the 12th graders even as the form teachers began to call out the 9th grade classes to sort the freshies out and walk them to the classroom block.

Myra watched Marston make his announcement and leave for the gym, still convinced that the vice-principal knew more than he let on. She looked at Cass again for affirmation, and saw Cassandra mouth the warning words Not here, before resuming her public persona as council president by immediately rallying some of the other council students to help the form teachers herd the wide-eyed freshies for a headcount, and then towards the hall exit doors.

Torrance, who still kept one eye on the clock, realised in the chat that he was the one who noticed that Emily's belongings were now carried by one of the three friends as if the items were theirs. If he wanted to have a closer look at the items, they would have to get hold of them somehow. Unfortunately, the girls were being led away already. Still keeping his wits about him, he couldn't help but see Professor Strom tap away angrily at his phone.

Kyle checked his phone to see the messages, which made him think of Zane again who had been looking at his phone. He looked back at Zane to see the troubled look on his face, followed by his attempt to hide his phone as the teachers approached. He clearly did not want anyone to know what was up with the device. Kyle followed Zane's gaze and glanced at what Zane was looking at. His gaze was directed at one of the security cameras high up in one of the corners of the hall, part of the security features that kept Ashford High safe.

Although they had a shared group chat as a class, some students used it more often than others. Class chairperson Shelly Marks used it more often than not to send homework deadline reminders, and the nicer of the classmates used it to post class photos and birthday well-wishes. In an exceptional moment such as this, most phones were swarmed with notifications because of the earlier student instinct to try to take photos unsuccessfully, and to react to what they had seen or felt. Class 4A's chat was no exception. Thanks to the chat, Jonathan, like the others who were taking the chance to compare notes, realised that there was some discrepancy in what they thought they just experienced, whereas others like Shawn were completely clueless about what was being discussed. Not all replied. Cass didn't say anything. Zane had chucked his phone, and Daniela -

Daniela stared blankly at Wren when Wren mentioned Alex's absence from school, her face still a broken mess of trauma. "He's not coming back. He's gone. I saw him leave. He's not coming back. He's not coming back. " Her babbling caught the attention of Dr Veritas, the school's care counsellor, who had arrived and was actively looking for students who might have had an adverse reaction to the situation. She came up to the two of them. "Thank you Wren, I can take care of Ms Flores from here. Daniela, come with me." Wren had the odd notion that it felt like Veritas was whisking her away.

At the gym hall, Joe was relieved to receive his sister's reply. Minsoo could hear that Vice-Principal Marston had arrived because of the announcement that was broadcast to the gym. Joe saw his ever-helpful classmate Kirk, Joe's saviour earlier, step up to help Corbin while Mendes and the form teachers rallied the 9th graders by class in order to lead them out of the hall. This meant there was no chance left for Joe or Minsoo to ask them more questions. But Minsoo was preoccupied with something else altogether more troubling. Without knowing exactly what she was doing, she reached out to try to replicate the same vibe she felt earlier, as if she were extending her senses to feel the life around her. In the garble of sensation, she felt the hundreds of students around her, which made her wonder if she was simply projecting, since she knew they were there. But the dark feeling was a different aura. It wasn't coming from this building, no it was further out, much more towards the centre of the school campus, somewhere below. Was it the burned annex that was the students' favourite location for making up ghost stories, or was that her mental projection again? All the same time, Minsoo could not deny the sensation.

After the announcement Torramce will try to be where Vice-Principal Marston may talk to anyone else on the school staff about what is going on. Mostly by weaving through the crowd quickly and then trying to stay unobtrusive.

"Are you good, Daniela?" Wren stood up as Dr. Veritas and Daniela walked away. "I'll come with you."

She didn't frame it as a question or wait for permission. She just started walking alongside them, staying close to Daniela. Whatever Daniela had seen about Alex, whatever had happened during that blackout - Wren needed to understand it. And something about how quickly Veritas moved to take Daniela away felt wrong.

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.