Chapter Text
The vice-principal, Ms. R, was embezzling funds. She was really kind of a jerk, and someone probably should have stopped her. But the principal had been missing for months. Because of the school's newfound lack of funding, the janitors had to be sacked. In their absence, mold thrived. A particularly mysterious orange mold took hold of Hallownest Elementary School. A lot of parents pulled their kids out of school, opting to homeschool, or simply let them watch edutainment shows all day and call it good enough. But some parents cared too much about their kid's education, sending them to school with COVID-era facemasks with fun designs to hopefully keep the spores away from their lungs. Other parents simply didn't care enough about their kids to worry about their death by mystery mold.
Our hero, if you could call them that, belonged to one such family. Their parents had divorced when they were a baby. Their father had won most of their siblings in the divorce, but following his mysterious disappearance months ago, the children had been scattered by the winds of CPS. Our hero, little Ghost, was the only one their mother could hold on to. But she wasn't exactly the best mother. She had had three passions: her husband, her children, and her garden. But after his affair was discovered, all of them faded. With her husband gone, the kids taken with him, and her garden overgrown, there was no love left for her remaining child.
Despite this, Ghost had a fairly normal life. Every day they would get ready for school on their own, and then walk across town to get there. Thus, kindergarten and first grade went by, and nobody suspected the sad reality of their home life. So on the first day of second grade, they were walking to school like normal, when they saw something on the ground. Bending over to pick it up, they saw that it was a toy sword, seemingly well-loved, judging by the duct tape holding it together. They picked it up and put it in their backpack.
When they got to the blacktop, they noticed that there were a lot less kids than there were last year. Usually, there was an uncountable number of kids running around and shouting, waiting for class to start. Now, there were only a few. The silence was melancholy (that had been their best word last year). The only sound was a girl who was singing to herself as she picked up rocks on the ground, and the playground monitor muttering something to himself. Ghost wasn't sure what they should do, so they got out the toy sword and started swinging at imaginary foes. They stopped once the bell rang, and when class began, they doodled their foes in the margins of the worksheets.
At recess, the playground monitor approached the child. He asked them where they got the sword, so they explained. He told them they could keep playing, but only if they promised not to hit anyone. They nodded in response. The nice old man then asked them if they could kill some "vengeflies" on their next adventure. They nodded again. Then they ran off on another imaginary adventure in their fantasy world.
The days went by, and Ghost continued to be a brave warrior, exploring the abandoned playground and pretending it was a long-forgotten kingdom, overrun by dangerous foes. The playground monitor would send them on little quests, and sometimes he would just talk about whatever was on his mind.
The mold continued to spread, students kept being pulled out, teachers kept quitting, but the child with a toy sword played on.