[Fall] Chapter 1: Re-Placement

Myra brings her compass symbols to the spot where she saw Emily yesterday. From there she wants to follow correspondence threads if she can find any.
To give her some plausible reason to leave her booth, she tips over the marble machine. It's a desktop perpetual engine, and an icebreaker to talk about science, math and that kind of thing. And now, the balls were all over the multihall room, rolling all over. (Actually, as she has pocketed the rest, no need to throw away a perfectly fine machine for a distraction. )



Chasing her metal balls will take her close to the spot where she saw the unknown symbol, the one that glowed most intently of them all.

Gym
It was a subdued vibe that Minsoo picked up on as she attempted to take in the sense of the others. There were little of the enthusiastic energy of yesterday, when the seniors were seriously trying to pitch their co-curricular interests to their juniors. Today was the boring clean-up, to be completed as efficiently as they could.

"The track team all ran off eh?" cracked Josh. Minsoo knew Josh Bradlee and Matt Stonemayer, both way more comfortable on the football field than in a classroom, who leapt at the chance to help Minsoo hump the rest of the tables. It was gossip that Matt fancied Della, one of the athletes in Minsoo's team. "Where is everyone else?" Was that Matt's slightly prying question? Having offloaded some of the work, Minsoo now had some chance to observe others to see if anyone was behaving oddly. On the other hand, if she could avoid the distraction coming from Matt, she might have the opportunity to use the senses that worked for her yesterday which allowed her to see connections between where Emily was and where she might have been or might have gone. With a bit of bustling, Joe ultimately made a beeline for where he last met Emily; he knew he wanted to get the exact location that would give him the most accuracy to do what he wanted to do next, which was to extend his awareness in various dimensions. The Lady had explained that to Joe before, the idea that one could perceive and thus operate in various simultaneous perspectives at the same time. Joe wasn't sure he understood all of it, but his sensitivities had developed more to comprehend that the physical, mental, spiritual, and metaphyiscal could all be perceived holistically. To the onlooker, it looked as if Joe was standing at a spot in the gym with his phone out, doing a breathing or meditation exercise. It wasn't the strangest behaviour that teens expected of other teens if they bothered to observe him, the only odd thought they might have had is why Joe would pause in the midst of their chores in this fashion.

In the created stillness of the moment, Joe had his insight: Emily is real as a real person is real, with a mind of her own, and is suffused with magic, and is also somehow enhanced by something in the spirit realm that allows multiple perceptions of her.Hall
Upstairs in the multi-purpose hall, Torrance contributed what he could with his fellow club members, but what he really wanted to do was slip away from the Gymnasium Block to return to the Burned Wing in order to tinker with the building's doors. No one was really policing or forcing the seniors to help with the clean up; it was simply them fulfilling their responsibilities to school. So Torrance could certainly do the irresponsible thing and skip out altogether. However, if he wanted to give the impression that he was responsibly helping out, (and also to provide an alibi for his whereabouts, assuming his mind worked this way), he could try to give the impression that he was present in the hall, while seizing an opportunity to go sabotage the Burned Wing doors, and then come back to pretend nothing had happened.Myra returned prepared with her carefully inscribed notes. She wanted to cover the area of the hall with her readings, and needed a distraction for it to happen. Her club mates were placing some of the gadgets they had displayed yesterday into boxes to carry back to where they belonged, and Myra did pick the least breakable one to 'accidentally' tip over. Metal marbles clattered and scattered all over the hall floor, and a few heads turned around. Straightaway and separately, Todd and then Junice bent over to pick up the stray ones near them. This meant that Myra could also lean over like them to 'chase' marbles.

What she was actually 'chasing', or tracing, was Emily's 'footprint' when she focussed on her. Myra could see on the floor the route that Emily took yesterday in the hall. It was like a web of lines: Emily walked from one booth to another, not necessarily visiting them in order judging by the crisscrossing. Following the lines backwards Myra could see where Emily entered. What was interesting to Myra was that their contradictory observations about Emily being in multiple locations were true. The lines sometimes branched into separate locations to be at different spots. And now Myra had proof that Emily didn't just vanish. The lines showed that she exited; it was a separate line leading out of the hall entrance from the line coming in. Stella Winthrope, or 'Stel' as she called herself in her slight British accent, saw Wren come over to the editorial booth as she was stacking up copies of their latest poetry compilation. The editorial club had two wings: most of their journalist endeavours were online, Daniela being one of those whose photography was always used in their feature articles and social media posts. The other wing was the creative writing wing, of which Stel was president. She seemed to intuitively know why Wren was crossing over. "You don't know where Daniela is either?" She frowned. "I thought you might know since you're in her class. I didn't see her in the canteen earlier. Last message I got from her was last night, strangely, about Alex. Do you know what's going on with that?" Her questions were concerned, serious; Stel did not simply dismiss Daniela's absence, her eyes landed on one of the posters they had made for the displays, an article about last year's sustainability project with one of Daniela's photos of the project as the centerpiece of the poster.

Torrance for sure does help some, and his leaving to secure the locks is as short as possible to do just that and come back to help

"Everyone else, or just someone else, Matt? I haven’t seen her all day." she says with a knowing smile. Girls talked, and Della had had enough to say about Matt for her own part, too. Minsoo would be lying if she said she didn’t get it. She did…

Did I see her yesterday, either?… she tries to remember.

She looks around the room then, not so much focused on the supernatural whereabouts of Emily, but instead focusing on the here and now.

Was Matt hitting on something Minsoo had overlooked?…

Never afraid of a bit of work Kyle pitched in with the robotic team, hoping the summer cooled off some of the heat from last year. With deft experienced hands he joins in on booth and drone obstacle course removal while trying to improve his image with the fellow students and faculty. With things changing all around he has decided that keeping in good with as many as possible and reinforcing a possessive image with leadership will help keep him from too much trouble. He focuses on doing good work to help clean up as fast as possible with the intent to go help out with any others nearby.

Kyle tries to keep an eye on the other from the group but not totally clear on any set plan. It seems a bit chaotic to him and he has never been great at starting projects. Meanwhile Glitch seem to be unusually active and gotten out of his transport case, which Kyle keeps in his pack with his school tablet and notebooks. The drone is thankfully staying close to Kyle, for now, but keeps zipping off to fly over the other students Kyle has been talking with about recent events.

Any time Kyle has a moment to rest as he moves between the booth site and the club storage back in the robotics lab he expands his newer senses. Trying his best to keep a low profile to this new set of senses he tries to analyze the sense of something watching and feeding of the school. Was it just the school or was it affecting a wider area. He had checked out his uncles home last night and was using today to get a better reading on the school. Paying attention to any changes across the campus, and writing short notes in a small notebook he keeps in his pocket, Kyle has been building a map of the campus and strange events then trying to correlate any odd impressions he gathers and noting Glitch's behavior as well when he checks them out.

"So you don't know either." Wren said, more statement than question. Then she tried to give Stel what she had. "She was in class this morning, but not after lunch."
"I was with her after the lights went back on. She was pretty shaken at first but seemed better when we parted. I thought she was ok."

When Stel's gaze drifted to the poster Wren followed it. Daniela's photo at the centre. The composition, the light caught just so.
"She's good," Wren said quietly. "Really good."

"What did she text you?"

Intuition told her that the poster might have significance, but that one she wouldn't be able to take unseen. So she looked around if there was anything else - something that would less likely be missed.

>>>Using the time he spent breaking down and packing the Art Club exhibits to observe the other students going about their tasks, Jonathan's eyes followed the drone buzzing about above the gym floor. The machine flitting to and fro in a curious cycle led him to finally find Kyle over near the robotics club table. He seemed occupied by disassembling the table and moving boxes off into the STEM classrooms where the robotics team presumably met for projects and classes.
>>> Transporting a stack of canvases back towards the Art Building, Jonathan engineered a meeting between himself and Kyle. "I got something I need your help with...if you're interested." he said as he momentarily stopped by Kyle. "Might stir up trouble, so I get it if you don't want in..."

Kyle chuckles as he replies "I'm in. So long as no one gets hurt I'm up for just about anything to figure out what really is going on. and quickly gets his still to a stopping point for others to pickup.

Gym
Emily's presence seemed to resonate with Joe precisely because he managed to ground himself at the exact same spot. It wasn't a connection to the past, neither was a sense of where Emily might be, for Joe's awareness did not yet extend across time and space. It was more like Emily had left behind some 'residual energy' that Joe could detect. One thing though that might have added to his ability to sense her: Joe had tried to look through the Way, or at least that how the Lady explained it to him when speaking of the spiritual realm. He had once asked her how many spirits were there, and she had said Ten thousand. And when Joe wondered aloud why the number was so small, she continued, Named ones. That peek gave him the confirmation of Emily's existence.Matt's ribbing hardly bothered Minsoo. Sarah, her team mate, wasn't present again. But perhaps that was Minsoo simply overreacting. She looked at track booth. The set of six hurdles they carried up to use to define the booth space was still there, no one had taken them back down to the sports equipment store. Trophies and medals from past competitions were still displayed on the table. The tee shirts and tracksuits, and other sports gear such as the relay batons were gone though. That must mean that they were already moved. Not everyone was a slacker after all!

Then something struck Minsoo that did bother her. The equipment that had been moved included a trio of javelins. But not the shot putts next to them, which made no sense as they would all be stored in the same place. For some reason Minsoo had an uncomfortable premonition about this, and she couldn't shake the sense of darkness that felt like it wrapped a tendril around these javelins. Ought she check on who had helped to take them out?Hall
Kyle, Jonathan and Torrance saw the opportunity before them in degrees of affordance.

For Kyle, it was circumspection, and Glitch behaved in a like-minded fashion according to its creator's wishes, surveying and watching. No one seemed to mind very much that Kyle's drone was in the air somewhere. He was a tad bolder in testing his senses further, by putting more of his focus into them. Here was his revelation to himself: it dawn on him that if he tried, he could recreate the blackout! Somehow in his awareness he could understand the raw nature of the electric currents that supplied the hall. By that it didn't just mean that he could see the wiring and ducting and central switches and where the circuit breaker box was. He understood that he could employ the right energy to turn the power on or off, or draw from it somehow. If something was feeding off the grid, he could try to locate it. Or if Emily was somehow associated with the blackout, he had a starting point to investigate.Jonathan saw the urgent need to wrest control of the narrative. He was quick to sketch Emily, guessing that somehow keeping a record of the 'evidence' was necessary in case things changed to the extent that everyone questioned whether things did happen the way it happened. Already the narrative erasure was evident in the cover up. He wanted to offer a counter narrative. Knowing that Kyle was the tech whiz, perhaps they could create something viral. There were others that came to mind: the Editorial Wing was key to both the journalistic endeavours in school and also managed the official social media channels. No coincidence that the person Wren was concerned about the most, Daniela, was somehow missing the entire afternoon. The gossip vine was another avenue. Nothing spread faster than if Sabrina got hear of it, and the 'Mean Girls' clique in class 4B was influential in a like manner.

Walking out of the hall as they went about their chores was a perfect time for Jonathan to see how Kyle could help. It had to be clever, it had to catch everyone offguard, and it had to have enough impact to shake whomever was doing the cover up.Torrance had also walked out of the hall with the other two, carrying an armful of whatever it was that he was asked to bring back to the Maths clubroom. It provided him the pretext of heading back to the counselling centre once he dispensed with the box of leftover materials. He was singularly focussed on what the group said they were planning to do next, which was to break into the Burned Wing, rather than what they could achieve now in the hall.

He reached the entrance of the building, watching the time to decide when was the best moment to do what he wanted to do, which was to sabotage the door locks so that they could gain access later. There was a need to think ahead: presumably he needed to know when all the people present would have left for the day before he could carry out his plan. Minimally there was the admin receptionist, Young. There was Veritas, whose actual office as a Chemistry teacher was in the STEM building. And even though he met only Nixon, he had to assume Necht was working in the building as well. What he also didn't know was exactly what time the caretaker would lock up the premises, and how the security system worked, although it wouldn't be wrong to assume that there would be some sort of campus security controls for its buildings.The first part of what Stel told Wren was something Wren knew already. Daniela had exchanged chat messages late into the night with Stel when she was home, after Wren and her parted, babbling on how she was worried about Alex. It was evident Stel and Daniela were good friends since Daniela shared her worries with Stel. From how Stel told it, Wren had the impression that Daniela likely did not talk about the more otherworldly aspects of her vision of Alex; either that, or Stel did not repeat it to Wren.

"She said she thought she knew where he was." This was new, Daniela must've deduced this way after Wren met her. "I asked her what she meant when she said she knew and her reply was 'I just know'. Her last message was: Blackwood Sanatorium. And then we didn't chat further after that." Anticipating Wren's next comment, "I googled, I don't think there's such a place."

While they were conversing, Wren considred holding on to the poster Daniela had contributed to. For some reason she figured that she could perhaps get a reading off it. It wouldn't be too difficult; things were being packed up, said posters would be rolled up to be chucked in a box to bring to the clubroom. If Wren offered to help carry the boxes, she could conveniently slip it away.

Hall
Having a fix on Emily'es exit, Myra picks up the last metal ball. She has been crouching to find it so she streaches her back, and is just in front of the spot where she saw the unknown symbol.

Its just a flat wall, but she knew what she saw and tries to feel whatever remenaint there could be. She has a silly flash of a Jedi master feeling the force, but is actually surprised when she does feel something. There is power here, or at least traces of Etheric energy. She touches her mother's pendant and the sensation stabilises, becomes clear as if a lens had been focused.

Gym - Joe
Joe could tell he wasn't likely to hold on to the impression of Emily for long. He was fortunate that he could still imprint her residual energy, for it crossed his mind, thanks to Jonathan's brainwave in taking the precaution of recording Emily's likeness, that whomever locked down the place yesterday might have intended to wipe all trace of the missing girl, or perhaps Emily herself intended to leave no trace with her sudden disappearance. Joe would learn later that Myra upstairs had also mapped Emily's fast fading route.Hall - Myra
With Emily's route determined, there was still no time yet to figure out how Emily could be able to walk multiple paths. Myra had to answer for herself one more question. She concealed the wave of her hand on the pretext of picking up the ball, and stared at the wall. At first, nothing. Then she touched her mother's pendant, and ... there was no better way for Myra to describe it than that she now saw the flash of a black room. Black was the colour of the floor and walls and ceiling, but it wasn't as if she felt negativity or darkness coming from it. The room was circularly shaped, and the symbol seemed to be inscribed on its floor, lightly glowing in the same hue as Myra's pendant appeared to pulse. Myra was certain the room was on campus. Even more certain, Myra felt the room had something to do with her mother.Outside the Burned Wing - Torrance
Torrance had nipped out so that he could make getting back into the Burned Wing more convenient for the rest of them later. His calculative mind worked out the various permutations so that he could decide what was most optimal based on the facts:
- He knew that the Counselling Centre would close at 5pm. That was when Ms Young would leave.
- He didn't know when Veritas, or Necht or Nixon would stay until. Staff sometimes left earlier, sometimes later.
- The caretaker crew typically locked up most of the school premises at 6pm, but that depended on who was staying back for what activities, so sometimes they would lock certain buildings later.
- The school, like most schools, would have a security system where some locations, such as offices, would be alarm wired.
Torrance had to decide what time he wanted to rig the doors. Too early, and the tampering might get discovered. Too late, and the doors would be locked already. Of course, there were other ways to tamper with doors, although his friends were only just beginning to learn how to do so.

Hall
This was not what Myra had imagined. Then again, she hadn't expected touching her mother's necklace, a geometric golden cage with a hanging stone, to help her focus.

With an effort of will, she returns to Emely's trail. She would have loved to chase down this circular room, but she already had a feeling that its in the basement.

She packs up the last bit of the mashine, and takes it out the door, where she left Emely's trail.

"Hey, Matt." she says then, her voice softer and more conciliatory than before. Her face is scrunched up as if she can’t quite figure something out.

"Did you see who took my javelins?" she asks, casting herself as representative of the track team as a whole.

"I’ll go check the storage room. If you see someone over here, can you let me know? And I don’t just mean Sarah, alright?

Owe you one!" she says, as she heads off to the storage room to see if she can rustle up those javelins.

Wren listened to what Stel had to say. When she mentioned the sanatorium, Wren had to control herself to not give away her realization. No one calls it a sanatorium anymore. Veritas's voice through the office door yesterday. That was a clue she could research later, but Stel likely had nothing more to give.

"If she messages you again, please tell me right away. Even if it doesn't make sense - especially then." Wren held her gaze. "And if you think of anywhere else she might be, anyone she might've gone to. Tell me that too."

"Now I can help carry a box, if it's useful. Then I should get back to mine." Wren said glancing at the half-packed booth.

She rolled the posters one by one and slid them into a cardboard tube. The one with Daniela's photograph at its centre went under the stack of sheet music she'd left on the booth edge.

Walking away, she realized what she just had done. Talking to a girl she barely knew, getting something out of Stel without giving away anything herself, snagging a poster. What shocked her the most was the ease with which she did it. And now she realized that the other fellow seniors might have meaningful information as well. She put her headphones on the way to the music booth and, recalling what she did at Dr. Veritas's door, she tried to repeat - concentrating on the entire hall this time.

Enroute to the Track - Minsoo
The sports equipment store was a series of sheds next to the bleachers of the football field and the running track. Minsoo exited the gymnasium, pretty certain that she would catch up with some of the track team moving things to the store. Sure enough, once she was headed in the general direction, she could see a scattering of students, not just those from track but from other sports as well, humping boxes and equipment towards the expanse of the field and the sheds next to them.

And there they were; she could clearly make out the javelins, it was not hard to see who might be carrying three long upright poles. It was ... Sarah? She was the only one not present in the gym yesterday when the blackout happened. And wait, she was only carrying two of them upright, the third was in her dominant hand, and she looked like she fell behind some distance from the others. She was now arching back, arm coiled back, javelin in her grip, wait a minute, was she about to throw it at the other students oblivious in front of her? Hall - Wren
Wren considered whether she could tune in differently. She had largely listened for the auras of those around, and thus far she could see a spectrum of things when she tried. It was most effective when she could do so undistracted and in a regulated environment. Sitting with the other six earlier in the day, conversing about their shared experience, enabled her to get a read on how they were like and who they were. In contrast, now Wren was trying something different. She reached out to sense the physical forces of the room: light spectrums, sound waves, the momentum and inertia of the fellow students around her. Her effort was still very tentative though; she might have picked up some things, but wasn't sure what to make of them.