[Fall] Chapter 1: Re-Placement

The seven of them sat in the waiting room of the counselling centre. Joe, Jonathan, Kyle, Minsoo, Myra, Torrance and Wren had been summoned for an appointment with the school counsellor, Dr Veritas. The second day of school had been uneventful thus far, with the seniors finally reporting to their homerooms in the morning, followed by the start of timetabled classes for them. Alex was absent again. No one spoke about the events of the previous day, at least not during class. But the unspoken hung in the atmosphere, like dry static in the air, almost enough to make the hair on one's skin stand on edge. The first few lessons felt equally dry, as if they were simply going to the motions of the introductory chapter of their textbooks, rote questions were asked, standard answers were provided. Things felt grey in the light of what happened yesterday.

Then the lunch bell rang, and finally the various cliques could catch up with each other. As luck would have had it, or was it sheer coincidence (if ever there was such a thing), the seven of them happened to have a common free period just before that, and Ms Alwood, whom they were happy to inherit again as their form teacher, told them in no uncertain terms to report to the counselling office, at the first level of the Redevelopment Wing.

The waiting room smelled faintly of lemon-scented disinfectant and a slight whiff of old sneakers, its walls a shade of serene sage, slightly sickly under the fluorescent lights. Various posters adorned them, a particular motivational one featuring a kitten dangling from a branch with the words "Hang in There!". On a low table sat a stack of National Geographic magazines neatly fanned out. It is a space designed to feel like a living room, but with bolted down chairs and the heavy, rhythmic ticking of the wall clock that was just a bit too loud for the room.

Every few minutes, the forced cheer of Ms Gracie Young, the receptionist and administrative assistant, answered "Care and Guidance Centre, how can we help you thrive today?" Her greeting was accurate, as the first floor premises housed both the care and counselling services, as well as the education and career guidance services. Veritas, head of department for Chemistry, was also Lead Care Counsellor. Necht and Nixon, as the students were introduced to yesterday, were the newly-posted guidance counsellors.

Leading away from the waiting room were the offices of said personnel, as well as meeting / counselling rooms further down the hall. It was to be expected that the seven of them were to be spoken to, in turn, but no one present yet knew what they had in common, except for hints of what they shared on their class chat app yesterday.

What do you do while waiting?

Torrance is going to talk quietly so they can't be overheard. "So, What do you think happened yesterday?"

Minsoo drummed her fingers on her own knee, as she sat cross legged in the long line of students awaiting Day 2 counseling sessions. It just so happened that the students assembled were also her friends…

"These newbs are really trying to hit the ground running, huh? Day two and half the grade is in here." she says, with a sigh that said she’d rather be outside doing something else.

"What do I think happened?" she asks, snd then hunches over conspiratorially towards the others!

"I think there’s something beneath the school. Something… weird. I think it might be weird enough to cause a black out."

She’d spent last night mulling it over. She’d even spoken to her parents, but only to figure out all the mundane explanations so that she could do away with them!

Kyle glances around, not quite trusting the school to be just a place of learning anymore, and joins the conversation with his own observations. "I have no idea what happened. And how come some people don't seem to even realize or remember what happened? Plus i know that others that aren't here also noticed things."

"Well I overheard the VP talking to professor Strom about some sort of 'mass awakeing'. In context it seemed to be related to what we expierenced. Strom seemed to want to enact a quarantine... of us seemingly. Though The VP seemed to be trying to hide the awakening...

>>>No stranger to the Guidance Office, Jonathan sat on the industrially designed, neutrally colored sofa like a dark cloud on a sunny day. He was distant, quiet, distracted...all the things people generally assume him to be on a good day. Neither yesterday nor today were 'good days'. The glass walls of the lounge made him feel trapped in a fish tank, on display like some sort of exotic fish in an aquarium...unable to see those observing them.
>>>"Usually when authority figures are talking about being 'woke', it's not meant in a good way..." he piped up leaning forward to let his arms fold up in a serious manner. "I dunno what happened yesterday but I think we've all got pieces of the bigger picture but nobody sees it all just yet. Makes me wonder if they're putting us all together to see what we all know individually before we start piecing it together ourselves."
>>>He looked at the others assembled in the lounge. Most of them had been in on the class group chat asking questions while everyone else was posting memes and goofing around. "In the interests of honesty and clarity, I think we need to put all our cards on the table and see what we've got. Mac and Torrence, you guys offered yours, here's mine." Jonathan fished around in his black backpack to produce a canvass and laid it on the table between them, sweeping off the National Geographics to make room. It wasn't the regular side of the canvas that drew attention but the back side that held rough sketches of a pigtailed girl. "Is this the 'Emily Walsh' you guys saw? This is the one Kyle and I saw around the Art Club tables."

Joe peers at the artwork."Good likeness. That’s the same girl who showed up at the running club stall just before the power cut. She had three friends with her who didn’t turn a hair when the lights came back on and she wasn’t there."

Later the other day, Wren finally got to reply to the class chat.
Wren: Emily was at the music booth. Sat next to me at the piano right before the blackout. Talk in person.

The waiting room smelled of disinfectant. Wren took the last empty chair and let herself settle for a moment, listening — not to the conversation already underway, but underneath it. The seven of them, whatever they were becoming, sitting in a row under fluorescent lights.

She looked at Jonathan's sketch when it came around. Nodded once. "Same girl. She sat next to me at the piano right before it happened."

She let that land, then moved on. "I overheard Veritas yesterday. She was asking someone who else knew about 'the Vance boy'." A pause. "Make of that what you will. I have my suspicions about whose side she's on."

She glanced around at the others. "And we seem to be somewhat special in some way. All of us in this room."

Myra seemed fareaway, untill Jonathan started to talk about Emily Walsh. Wait, what? That is not right. I was talking with her and her two friends when the power went out.
How many Emilies were there? Or did we see the same girl in different locations at the same time?

And ehm... when the power went out, I saw symbols on the walls. And I'm pretty sure that Vice-Principal Marston could see them too.
She leavs through her notebook, and slows down when she gets to a page with symbols. The first page bears signs of being drawn quickly, and on the second page the symbols are drawn with more care, as if she was copying them from somewhere else (OOC:The golden symbols)
There are two symbols that havent been redrawn (OOC:The black symbols)

Glancing over at the sketches Kyle shares a bit more info "I'm pretty sure Zane also know more about what happened, though I'm not sure what."

Kyle is getting a bit nervous about the entire situation. Getting pets is cool and all bit if there are others or there, and it seems like there are, and they already know that much more about things and have no issue making kids diaper then it's also critical to lean as much as possible, as quick as possible.

As they chat Kyle idly looks around to ensure none of the adults can overhead and checks his phone for any posts by other students.

"Look, I don't know why we're all gathered here, but I don't think it's a coincidence. And I think we are all on the same page that we want more info?
Regardless of what all of them" Torrance gestures vaguely around with his head "may want?"

>>>"So we all saw the same girl at the same time, talked to her, and then she was just gone. Nobody but us seems to remember her." Jonathan restated, just to be clear in the matter. "And that's on top of other weird stuff happening to us individually from what you all said and overheard. Me included."
>>> He looked at the symbols sketched in Myra's notebook and scratched his head. Some of the symbols he recognized as being similar to things he'd seen in occult artworks every good Goth has seen at some point bust as for what they meant he was at a loss. "A lot of those look like leit motifs or other imagery in some occult works I've seen...and in weird graffiti I've seen online...but what do they mean? Where are they from?" He tried committing the symbols to his memory before putting the notebook back on the table for other to look at.
>>>"'The Vance boy' that you said Veritas mentioned. That's probably Alex Vance...he was absent from school yesterday and today. I think something has happened to him. Something bad..." he thought back to his vision from yesterday and the fact that he himself was the only one of the three with yesterday's date who was still around. "We should check that out after school. Just to be sure."

Comparing accounts of what happened yesterday did one important thing. It made the seven of them realise they were not alone in their weird experience of yesterday's incident. They struggled to find an explanation of the matter, with such inconsistency in the differing accounts.
What was niggling in their minds was why they were told to report here. Was it routine, in that the school was simply going through all the students in turn? Or was it something they did that singled them out? Was it … that they did or saw something which could only be described as out of the ordinary? They were beginning to conclude that there was no such thing as coincidence.

Perhaps the next part of the answer lay behind that door, to the counselling room, even as the first name was about to be called.

"Myra saw her with two friends. Joe and I saw her with three." Minsoo muses, wondering if there was something there! The girls hadn’t seemed that phased about Emily disappearing, so maybe they were a part of the mystery; an indication of how many times the girl had replicated herself.

It was crazy for Minsoo to even consider such a thing, but then again… she had spent all night wondering about the thing in the basement.

Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night…

Through the night… Minsoo had put a hundred names and faces to the thing. She scrunched up her face then:

"An awakening. Maybe whatever this is, it’s meant to wake up whatever is in the basement? And the symbols…" she says, but comes up short.

"Empowers it? Keeps it locked up?"

Who could say?…

Kyle took in the layout of the room as they talked with each other. The lobby they had entered led past the receptionist's desk counter, right to the waiting area. Two doors on the far side looked to be the counsellor's offices. Wren knew the first room because that was the door she eavesdropped yesterday, with Dr Isabella Veritas on the nameplate, and the word Wellness below. The adjacent door had a blank nameplate, and said Support below it. A corridor past those two doors led to the counselling rooms. Joe and Jonathan, and whomever else had had to pay a visit here before, would be familiar with what those rooms were used for. It would be one of those rooms they were lined up to meet Veritas.

In the opposite direction of the admin assistant's desk was another corridor. Torrance had stood up, presumably to stretch his legs, but he eyed the computer Young was working on. Was he tempted to try to gain access to it, in order to look up the counselling records on Alex Vance? The washrooms were near the end of that corridor, beyond which was a barred door that looked like it led to the building's staircase. Along the corridor were doors labeled Archive and a more worn out door with an older looking frame that said Maintenance, likely a supply closet.

Kyle was pretty sure that Young paid them no heed; the admin assistant was used to the coming and going of students on an hourly basis, who surely mastered the art of tuning them out unless they did something that called attention to them. He spotted the security cam in the ceiling corner, a regular feature of the various locations of school campus.

They now had shared much information with each other, but sorting it all out to make sense was still a mystery. Minsoo decided to see if she could add to the collective knowledge, especially since Torrance had mentioned overhearing the term 'awakening', a word that Joe seemed to have some insight on judging by his frown. Minsoo started to sing aloud, her tune allowing her to feel more of her environment and beyond. But this time things felt more garbled. The clarity she had yesterday in vibing with the campus wasn't present today. Was it because yesterday's vision opened a connection she could latch on to, whereas today she needed to figure it out all by herself? Nonetheless, she still had the vague sense that she was closer to the dark sensation today than she was yesterday.

Wren as always attuned to herself, it was instinct for her. She could sense the trust from the others as they freely shared what they had learnt, but all the same she felt better if she could relate to their auras. To her, Joe and Jonathan, like yesterday, lit up the room the most; Torrance felt like he was half a moment behind, observing things; Wren felt her own manifest as a half note, more of a B flat today. From the admin assistant Wren didn't get any pariular vibe.

Kyle's quick check on the class chat did reveal that there were others scheduled to meet the counsellor as well. Sabrina was indignant about it, and Raven had added a quiet Me too in reply.

Joe leans forward, his voice soft but intense. "So correct me if I’m missing anything, but we’ve got one student who never turned up at all yesterday, another who did a bunk in front of us, but most people didn’t notice, the staff responded by clearing the school but not calling the police. I don’t expect everything here works like on TV, but police aren’t usually subtle, are they? Yet we didn’t see a thing. That tells me the staff wanted to take care of it themselves, whatever ‘it’ is."

With a swift confident movement of someone who is used to moving anywhere as if they shoild be there Torrance breezes by the receptionist (?) without bekng noticed and theit hand lands on the doork ob of the Archives as they gently turn to check if it is locked.

He had laid it out precisely. No police, staff handling it themselves - same conclusion Wren had reached yesterday, there was something considerably wrong.

She watched Joe for a moment. The singing bowl note was right there, steady and unhurried, the kind that didn't ask whether you were ready for it. Close up she could hear what she'd only half-caught yesterday, harmonics underneath the fundamental note that didn't belong to now, older layers, other registers. She didn't quite know what to do with that.

Jonathan hit her almost simultaneously, equal in intensity but opposite in character. A gong's edge - the initial strike full and immediate - and then the sustain collapsing faster than it should, bleeding into shimmer before the note could resolve.

Myra resonated like a pipe organ's lowest register, formal and structural, the kind of tone that lived in old stone and didn't shift.

Minsoo was a voice held open, broader than made sense for the size of the room, radiating outward rather than staying contained. Warm in a way that made the space easier to be in.

Kyle was something digital and staccato, a signal in short precise bursts that kept almost resolving into something recognisable and then didn't. Less like music than like the idea of music, arriving in fragments that never quite assembled.

Torrance she caught in fragments - a precise, clean tone that arrived slightly ahead of where she expected it, or perhaps behind, she couldn't settle on which. Every time she turned her attention toward it directly it had already moved on.

She checked the admin desk. Ms Young.
Nothing. Not quiet - absent. Wren sat with that a moment longer than the others.

She looked at Joe.
"You're not surprised," she said quietly. "About the awakening part."