schoolisin | (no subject)

(no subject)

Who: All y'all
When: Day 1 – Morning
Where: Everywhere
What: School is in

[Somewhere, a bell begins to ring. You may know the type—obnoxious and loud, signalling the start of a brand new day of lectures and learning. Rise and shine, lovelies; wakey wakey eggs and bakey! And with that, just as the toll falls silent, you hear the sound you may have been waiting for: the click of a lock.

You're free to explore.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

. . . at all?

... We had to quest to bring her back from our patron. It took our blood, from a bunch of people. And one of those people was a werewolf, so now she's... got something weird going on.

Then, we had to quest for Nyssa again to fix the broken clock, so she'd ever revive Sparrow again. It took more of our blood, from six people, and had us rewound to kids for a few days.

And then, even after all that, she warned us that the next time Sparrow dies in one of her games, there will still be other consequences.

. . .

[he's quiet for a long, long moment]

. . . if you lost one of Mirror's games, you had to face a penalty. Some of them weren't bad, but others were . . .

She liked to break people - their minds. She shattered one of my friend's mind into three different pieces . . . you could tell, because it was like he was three different people. He's still like that, only it's . . . far more distinct. She never fixed him.

Even when my team took her patronage, we couldn't stop it. If anything, it earned us her protection, but everyone else's distrust. Not that there was much trust going around in the first place.

...

That was stupid as fuck, but I can't blame you for wanting to be safe from that.

Well . . . it was more that we wanted her protection overall. We weren't a very strong team, and we depended a lot on our partner team.

We weren't the only ones to patron ourselves to dangerous Judges, but . . .

... Partner team?

Ah - yeah. Teams were partnered together, and even lived together after we moved blocks.

... moved?

How did partnered teams work, and why were you moving?

Because Sabra - the one I know, was very, very dangerous.

And we . . . worked together in games? For those games where the Judges wanted to put teams together, at least.

... Trust me, I know that Sabra is dangerous, but I don't see how that has to do with moving.

[she has a teammate who was . . . probably in the pillar, and the pillar exploded, and that sure is a conversation he doesn't want to have]

The water supply got tainted. [there that's a happy medium and sort of not a lie] So they moved us to the south block.

[sorry shinichi, i am capable of logic.]

... They're gods. Cleaning a water supply has to have been easier than moving all those people. There has to have been more to it than that.

There is. But I don't want to talk about it. For more than one reason, too.

Is it something I would want to, or should, hear?

. . . what happens when someone on your team disappears?

... that's an unexpected similarity across these things.

They get put in these... pods. Soul Pods, they're called. They sleep, resting to recover their strength so they don't break apart again, or so we're told.

. . . in Sabra, they either went with the Foreman, or they were eaten by the earth. They ended up in something called the Pillar - I mentioned it earlier, but . . . it's a terrible place. People came back from it sometimes, but they were traumatized by it.

It was destroyed, at one point. And it became dangerous where we were. That's why we were moved.

What happened to the people who were in the Pillar?

[I DON'T LIKE WHERE THIS IS GOING]

Some people came back . . . or kept coming back, at least. Some never did.

[you can see her get tense, but she's taking deep breaths to keep herself calm.]

... Bluebird should be safe... She made it to my world. She must have. And she would have brought most of the ones from her time back, too.

[or she's trying to convince herself this is true, anyway.]

. . . I really hope she did.

[he sounds earnest, at least. He almost got eaten once, and it was enough to scare the life out of him]

She's stubborn and would never stop fighting... If you didn't see her get out of there, she definitely did.

[shinichi might notice that there is a note of desperation to her voice- she has to believe this, she has to convince herself, nothing went wrong and bluebird is fine and they brought spark and everything turns out fine]

I'm sure she did. If she was from Pyxis . . . they were pretty tough. Vulpecula too.

[usually, he wouldn't care. But he's so out of sorts himself that he isn't about to dash someone else's hopes]

Yeah... I've seen how tough they are.

[with confirmation from someone who was there, she manages to force herself to calm down. yes, surely this is the case.]

... Thanks.

. . . [he nods, and takes a deep breath before standing up]

Thanks for telling me about your place, too.