Snippet #2400605

Residential Hall.
1320.

Arthur had the strangest of minds. It was the first thing that drew Keiko's attention upon speaking to the boy. She had met him before, of course, if only briefly; Icarus was a loose canon, but there was no way that even she could have snuck someone into the building without anyone knowing about it. Trephan had examined the boy while he was asleep, and declared him interesting, but now, awake and alert and vibrant, Keiko found him delicious. The Instigator would likely find him quite the opposite, but that would only make things more fun.

"Well, it's nice to- uh-" She didn't get much further, as Arthur rapidly lost interest in her and started to walk away. Keiko would have followed, but the sudden presence of the others was more than a little distracting. Devan clearly wanted nothing to do with them, but he was going their way; there was no avoiding the boy. Keiko didn't smile at him, choosing instead to fearfully duck her head in submission, as if hoping he would pass her by without notice.

It seemed to work, given that Devan gave them little more than a look in passing before trailing after Arthur. Aveline, who had been standing beside her up until this point, apparently was not satisfied with being ignored, however. Keiko very nearly smiled when she felt the idea pop into Aveline's head, but she managed to restrain herself, and even look shocked and appalled when Aveline charged forwards and launched herself at Arthur, crushing him to the floor.

"Aveline! That's not very nice! Don't hurt him, he's not done anything wrong!" Oh, if only she knew. There was a special little place in Trephan's heart for Aveline; his murderer. What would the girl say if she realised the man she thought she had destroyed was now possessing Kieko quite so expertly.

Her brother was clearly not particularly pleased with what was going on; Keiko watched him pass with interest, wondering if another battle was about to break out.

Room 1.
1325.

Icarus was a traitor. She thought she ran the game. She thought she was so clever... Tori glared out from the crack in the door, his mauve eyes alight with a fierce anger. Alone now, abandoned by Xavier and left trapped by his own indecision, he looked nothing like the confused but harmless young man that he had been only moments before. That spark of unusual, sharp insight had fanned into a razors edge- there was something dangerous in his expression.

"Sending out your pet, Icarus. That was mean. That was... naughty."

He watched as the others drew Xavier's attention, watched as the focus was pulled further and further away from himself. Aveline too- did she even remember that she had been his? That she was his tool, not a free agent any longer?

Tori closed his eyes, summoning up a strange, warping sensation in a dimension that Arthur could likely sense. "You forget, though, Icarus... people only remember you because you got burned."

To Arthur, it would be as if reality suddenly creased; a dimension of fabric space, running in a plane that overlapped seamlessly with the everyday world, was suddenly torn by expert fingers. Close, but not so close as to be on top of them, the tare widened, exerting a sucking pressure that built and built to a horrible level before suddenly stoppering closed with a jolt. The ripples left behind swirled and settled, but only for a moment before striking up elsewhere, this time with the impression that something had been pulled forth and set back in the physical world before the fabric space was stitched shut again.

Tori had vanished.

Infirmary.
1325.

In literally every sense of the word, Jack felt awful, and for once he remembered every second of what had happened to him. For so many years, he had begged every deity he could think of to let him remember, let the strange, alarming periods of absence leave him, but now, for the first time in his life, he wanted nothing more than to forget.

In one terrible moment, his entire world had shattered into fragments, the bedrock of his soul torn free and shattered. Vinny was gone. His parents were so far out of reach that they might as well be. His friends- his family- his career- in one fell swoop everything he held dear and everything that he had ever worked for had slipped like smoke though his fingers, and he couldn't get it out of his head.

He had woken feeling sick and disoriented, a sensation that lasted even now, hunched up as he was in the tiny, dark hideaway that he had selected after hurling himself out of bed and scrambling as fast and as far as he could away from the corpse he had been laid out beside. It was cramped and uncomfortable for someone of his height to crunch down into such a small cupboard, but it made him feel more secure than anything else had so far.

Sarah opening the door, on the other hand, was not so nice; the light slanted in and burned Jack's watering eyes, leaving him feeling even more nauseated than he had previously. But despite the fact that he was forced to turn his head away with a shudder, part of him cried out desperately for the few people that had become familiar to him in this nightmare.

"I- I don't think I'm ready to come out yet..." It would be a tight fit, with Sarah in the closet with him, but Jack couldn't actually think of anything he desired more than being held right about now.