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The night settled slowly over the SPDM's American branch, the chill of evening barely distinguishable from the rigidly air-conditioned halls of the school. It wasn't a natural cold, the kind that Jessica had felt many a night before, but something clean, sterile, as devoid of life as the black and white tiles that spread across the school as ubiquitously as grass. For a brief time, the sound her hooves made on the surface had been a novelty, the clip-clop echoing back and forth through the school's almost infinitely long halls. After a few days of it, though, she began to hate the sharpness of the din.
The smell of the school was even worse, this stinging, acrid scent that tickled at her nose and throat. It was pervasive like the moss in Green Lake, everywhere so completely that it seemed to belong to nowhere in particular. When Vertin led her here, Jessica had asked her what it was. She didn't know what "bleach" was, or why one would want to clean the floors, but maybe that was just one of the many mysteries of Vertin's "outside world." Jessica looked forward to telling her Jennifer about it, to seeing her laugh, her sapphire eyes closing gleefully as her voice danced with her breath. Maybe tomorrow, Jessica hoped. Tomorrow, they could share stories again, as they had a long time ago.
Tonight, however, Jessica was alone, her hooves slowly stamping a staccato beat through the empty passages as she wandered with no direction. Her head was full with the dizzying words of the Instructors in brown, ideas that twisted and turned away from her attempts to hold onto them like a fish in a stream. There seemed to be new lessons to follow every time, about what to say and when, or about how to act and what to think. Sometimes, it all felt like a joke, and she couldn't help but laugh, delighted by the punchline. The Instructors would look at her seriously then, and her smile would fade as she realized that she'd broken another one of their rules.
Jessica chewed on the questions swirling in her head like she would a tasty-looking leaf, but she couldn't break any of them down into bite-sized pieces. The leaf had become a stone, her teeth aching from the mistake of the attempt. The "midterm" game was soon, and she was eager to try it. She hoped it would be different from the lessons, but she couldn't help but feel like it would all be much the same. The Instructors existed in this cold place, belonged to it. Their play was as rigid as they were, hidden from the sun in the pale lights overhead, like the ones that had played with her first.
They were hiding the sun from her too, she knew, keeping her indoors more than not. If she was outside, it felt like never for very long, not enough to find that connection to the grass and the trees. It didn't help that the great stinking machines ran the second day she was there, slicing apart at the fields to keep so much of it level. If they could not make the whole world out of black and white tiles, they could at least cut it down to the same height.
Maybe that's what they were doing to her? The game was for her to change, to become just like the children in white that swarmed from class to class unendingly. They echoed that one phrase together so perfectly that Jessica could hear them from any distance. "May the peace be with us." Would they make her say that, too? She'd never heard her Jennifer use it, but Sonetto held her fist close to her heart when she whispered it.
"May the peace be with us." Jessica said idly, trying the words in her mouth herself. They felt uncertain and hollow, another's story spilling hesitantly from her lips. Jessica shook her head as she kept pacing forward. She had taken her Jennifer's story in Green Lake, and she had been wrong. The game couldn't be pushing her back to where she started. She felt sure about changing, that rule felt certain as stone in her mind… just not into what.
In the air, just over the ever-present smell of bleach, came a hint of a familiar scent. Jessica stopped, curious, bringing a hand quizzically through her hair as she tried to bring the memory to mind. She knew this scent, and that the thought was nagging at her incessantly told her it was one she had learned recently. She sniffed again, trying to focus on it, isolate it. Where she knew it was recent, yes, but there was age worked into the notes of the fragrance. New, but old, and smelling faintly of rain.
Jessica stayed still for a moment longer, trying to hold the smell in her mind until it was fixed in place. Her finger traced new knots in her auburn locks as she started to follow the trace visible only in her mind's eye to its source. As she walked, the new-but-old smell grew in strength, grew in familiarity, but still didn't quite seem right, somehow. Recognition was bounding away from her, like a victim away from an axe-murderer, and into oblivion. She chased after it doggedly, falling into the role of pursuer so naturally that she hadn't any hope of noticing, until at last she found its source.
Though she had started it far from the dormitories, her journey had inevitably taken her back. A row of doors lined the hall, behind which students dreamed or studied in the late hours of the night. They all looked the same, differentiated by only a number marked with black iron bolted to the wood. For a moment, Jessica was worried she'd found a dead end, her chase ending here in the quiet hallway. The scent hadn't dissipated, though; it remained, present and strong, by one door in particular.
Jessica approached it slowly, examining the uniform shape for any clue. None seemed to appear; the door was the same as any other, marked by age but still maintained. It wasn't rotting or creaking, it wasn't stained by blood or any ghostly goo. It was simply, only, a door that smelled so strangely like a friend.
Jessica stared at the handle for a moment, wondering if this was part of the game, too. She looked around - not an Instructor in sight. She grabbed the handle and twisted - but not far, the lock halting her movement almost instantly. Frustrated, she tried again, and again the lock halted her. "Son of a don'tsaythatJessica!" She "swore," approaching viciously. No wonder her Jennifer did it so much, she thought with some satisfaction. Darn if it didn't feel good.
Still, no amount of foul language would unlock a locked door. There were only two options now, really; through the door, or under it. There was no way she'd give up on it, not now. Be she monster or last girl, there was no room for defeat in her heart.
Through was the most appealing option. It wouldn't be hard at all to become one of Green Lake's axe murderers, hacking at the door until it surrendered to the blows. The violence would create noise, and with that, Instructors. If she was breaking a rule again, she'd never learn what was inside. She could try to become a ghost, but the undead was more her expertise; it wouldn't make for a very good story if the spectral horror clonked her head into the wood.
There was something disappointing in the strategy of going under. After so long cooped up playing boring games, the catharsis of wood chips kicking against summoned skin felt so terribly tempting. Still, her Jennifer had told her more than one story about snakes and spiders, and they had as much a place as a gore-spattered psycho. She stooped over to examine the gap between door and floor, measuring out the transformation she'd need, when…
Click.
The sound of a lock disengaging was so loud in Jessica's ear that it was almost deafening. She instinctively trotted back, head snapping back up to face the sound. Only silence greeted her, and a closed door… but no longer a locked one.
Slowly, Jessica extended her hand again. She felt her heart pound a little faster as she reached for the handle, her mind racing through tales she'd been told of hauntings and ghostly encounters. None of the ones her Jennifer had told her matched this, though, nor was it like any she had cobbled together in her years alone. The smell of rain was growing stronger. Her fingers wrapped around the metal handle, curling into a grip, before Jessica pulled down. Nothing stopped her, and with a sharp creak, the door lazily began to swing inwards.
Her Jennifer couldn't be in the room. Jessica knew that on a level so core to herself that she didn't know it existed. There were no notes of flowers, like a glade in spring, just the smell of damp earth and waterlogged wood. Still, the question left her lips without thinking. "Jennifer?" Jessica asked, pushing the door inwards with her palm as she trotted inside. Silence; there were no occupants inside besides her, but she could not call the space empty.
In one corner, a desk faced the opaque white window. Papers covered its wooden face, a pencil abandoned on top of them after its owner gave up on working. The desk had many drawers, none open, but there was a small cubby with something inside it. Next to the drawer was a door left open to a bathroom, the lights off and the smell of rain ever so slightly weaker. Opposite that was a sliding closet door, behind which hung white students' robes patiently. In the last corner was a bed, perfectly made after its owner had awoken. The sheets were crisp and clean, straightened to avoid any wrinkles. It was a room tidier than her own, but its occupant was nowhere to be found.
Jessica frowned as she examined the empty room from its center. The smell of rain seemed to be sunken into the walls and floors, not from any opened window or vent. It was like this place had been dredged from the bottom of a lake, cleaned and refurbished, but even with every inch replaced, the water remained. Her eyes returned to the anomalous shape in the desk, its profile slim but warped ever so slightly by use. For a moment, she considered if perhaps the shape was a sleeping critter, and to reach in would invite bites on her grasping fingers… but so too had the room invited her in, to see and touch. With renewed confidence, Jessica stepped close enough and reached in.
There were no nibbles, friendly or otherwise, as her hand found the leathery face of an SPDM-issue notebook. It took little effort at all to extract the tome of adolescent observations from its resting place, and soon Jessica held her prize in her hands. She looked down at it quizzically; it looked much the same as the one she'd been given, though this had been much more thoroughly used. The cover tended to bend open, held that way time and again until it had become a habit. The pages inside were softened by use, the weight of a pen running over them beating their firm faces into submission.
It was something on the cover, though, that caught Jessica's attention. Her eyes struggled to focus on the characters drawn in a childish scrawl, made even more imperceptible in the dark of the rain-touched room. It took effort, but eventually, a result: A flowing V, a flattened e and r collapsing into each other, a t tall like a lamp-post…
"Vertin?" Jessica read aloud, unsure of both her reading and of the thing she was holding.
In the corner of her eye, something changed at the word, an almost infinitesimal and instant divergence. Millions of years of evolution had trained her brain to focus on the change, no matter how slight, with instinctive intensity, and Jessica turned her head about to face the abnormality without thinking.
The bed was no longer as it was, the sheets disrupted and curled up from the edges. The pillows were dented from recent pressure, one lying abandoned on the floor. No detail mattered more than one, however.
The bed now had an occupant.
Beneath the blankets, covered completely from head to toe, shivered a body. It did not make any sound, but Jessica could see the way the blanket rose and fell rapidly with its agitated, absent breathing. Whoever they were, whatever it was, they were made small by the way they curled into a fetal position, knees tucked close to their chest as they shivered.
Jessica stared at the shape beneath the blankets, confused. Some cervine instinct had begun to scream at her to leave, to bound through the still-open door while escape remained an option and put the smell and now sound of rain well behind her. That impulse was the one that made her gently tremble as she approached, but it was not the one that ruled her as she came closer and closer, raising her hand. Just as it was in the stories, hers and other's; eventually, the heroine needed to face the truth.
"Vertin?" Jessica asked again, this time out of concern, her hand touching the lifted blanket gently.
The blanket collapsed. It began to rain.
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The guard seemed unsure how to respond to Vertin's presence, the reedy man more accustomed to managing the occasionally unruly child than a teenager with a cutting stare. Her eyes lingered on his hands, thin and firm like a cat o' nine tails. It wasn't difficult to suppress the instinctive shudder, but that she had to at all left a faint mark of worry on her mind. Thank God she only had to be here for fifteen minutes.
"I'll buzz you in," the guard said, as if this was somehow her first time her, much less the first time they had done this dance before. Politely, Vertin nodded, and fixed her attention on the door. Despite how nervous the inhabitant of the room clearly made the guard, and the instructors, it remained a happy surprise that Jessica's room had no noticable modifications. From a distance, one would think that her room was the same as any other.
Through the wood, Vertin could faintly hear the chime of the PA system, and a muffled announcement heralding her presence. The guard stared through a hidden security slot, peering into Jessica's room for a long moment, before looking back at Vertin. "Okay," he said, his words punctuated by a sharp buzzing sound as a small lock on the handle came undone. "Fifteen minutes."
"Thank you." Vertin kept her response clipped and polite, and her eyes on what was ahead of her. She turned the handle and gently pushed the door open, half-expecting to find Jessica already excitedly waiting at the entrance.
Instead, the girl was sitting dazedly on her bed in the corner, her hair significantly messier than usual, and her face slackened with exhaustion. A pang of concern rushed through Vertin's body so strongly that it hurt, sympathetic aches rippling out from old scars. "Jessica?" She asked, moving swiftly, though not alarmingly, into the room.
Jessica's head picked up at Vertin's voice, and she smiled as brightly as she could through the exhaustion. "Vertin!" She exclaimed, her voice fainter, but still excited. "You came!"
Vertin smiled disarmingly as she came to a halt at Jessica's side. The girl didn't look like she'd slept at all the night before, and her clothes seemed… damp? "Of course, I promised I'd keep seeing you." The Timekeeper replied. She put a hand on Jessica's arm, and frowned almost imperceptibly as her skin registered that the surface they touched was still drying. "Did you go for a swim? Your clothes are wet."
Jessica shook her head slowly, hesitantly. "No, I don't think so." She answered. "I think it rained last night."
"Rained?" Vertin repeated. Well-honed experience and training were both beginning to see ominous writing on the wall, though yet she couldn't read it. She tried to recall any trivia of the night before, but to the best of her memory, it should have been a cloudless night. "What do you mean?"
Jessica looked at Vertin for a moment, confused. At first, Vertin thought that Jessica was confused at her, but as her lips twisted in thought, she realized that the young woman was confused at herself. "It rained," Jessica repeated, less sure than before, but still enough so to make the claim. "In your room last night, it rained."
Vertin measured Jessica's words out carefully in her mind. She offered a simple no with her chin. "I didn't study here, Jessica." She explained patiently. "I went to a school like this one, but not this one."
It was Jessica's turn to shake her head again, this time emphatically. For the first time, Vertin noticed that Jessica was clutching something to her soggy clothes. It looked like a standard SPDM notebook, probably the one that she had been assigned when she'd been admitted. Vertin couldn't ever remember seeing Jessica hold it before; the change felt, or maybe simply was, alarming.
"But it was your room!" Jessica protested, her voice taking on a petulant edge. As if she had noticed the notebook in her hands for the first time too, she lifted it up towards the arcanist, the cover still facing herself.
Vertin took the notebook as offered. The moment her fingers so much as scraped the surface of it, a wave of powerful familiarity threatened to drown her. Slowly, she turned it around in her hands, and her eyes traced the childish way she had signed her name so long ago. Vertin looked up at Jessica, unable to disguise how stunned she was. "Jessica, how did you get this?" She asked, keeping her voice as even as she possibly could.
Jessica cocked her head gently, like a puppy. "From your room, Vertin," she explained again slowly. "I found it last night."
"But…" Vertin stopped herself, reassessed. "How did you find it?"
Jessica paused for a long moment, thinking, before finally shrugging. "I thought I smelled you."
Vertin nodded, as if the answer made much sense. Her eyes darted to the clock - time was dwindling, and there were other things she needed to discuss with Jessica while she could. As she changed topic, however, her hands clasped the notebook tightly to her, her fingers gripping into the cover as intensely as Jessica's had.
When the time was up, and the door closed behind her, Vertin stared ahead of her for what felt like an eternity. Her mind spun Jessica's words back and back again, trying to find any sense, any reason as to why a notebook she'd lost a lifetime ago would show up an ocean away from where she'd misplaced it. A ribbon of fear was run through the loom of her friend's other insistence, the other impossibility - that it had rained.
A thought, or maybe just a pang of memory, made Vertin lift her notebook and flip through its pages. She didn't remember what she was looking for, not consciously, but with perfect precision regardless, she found it. There, in the corner of one page amongst many, was a sketch she'd made in faded pencil. The accuracy of the drawing left something to be desired, the proportions odd and incorrect, but the spirit of the image felt like a bullet.
She had drawn a deer.