A dark haired woman walked with no sense of urgency down a hallway. As she strode, she waved, passing a few other students that casually waved back with cheery smiles. She rounded a corner and dropped into the first door on her right, stepping into an empty classroom as the handle clicked. Noticing the lack of people, she tossed her backpack onto the large wooden desk at the front of the room and fell into the seat behind it. Gently placing a large object that looked suspiciously like a cartoonish skull with a handle on the desk, she plugged in her scroll and began scrolling. Kicking her legs up onto the desk, she chose a song and leaned back with a satisfied exhale.

Dawn Crane sat in the "Unofficial Beacon Clubhouse," a spare, previously unused, and slightly-more-soundproofed-than-average classroom. Weeks prior, she went through a multi step ordeal of convincing the faculty of Beacon Academy to use a room for the purposes of band practice with the fellow members of her band, the Silent Songbirds. Due to misaligned schedules and miscellaneous obligations, Dawn often found herself lacking the talents of the other members and instead discovered that a soundproof room meant more or less free reign for speakers. Reappropriating her overly complex weapon that just so happened to function as one, Dawn enjoyed homework and leisure time accompanied by her style of music. Gradually, people began to hear assorted rock from just past the door, and suddenly the room became a hangout for the teams of Beacon.

Today, however, Dawn was alone in a classroom on a formerly quiet Friday afternoon. Glancing back at the chalkboard, she scanned the dusty black that was covered by random sayings, lewd drawings, poorly thought out rumors, and all manner of song lyrics. Some were her own, some were her favorites, and some she had been meaning to ask about once there were people around. Grabbing an eraser, a poor sketch of a poorly treated professor was lost to scuffs and replaced by bits and pieces of a song in progress accompanied by the hums of a basic tune that outlined them. Several versions later, Dawn cleanly copied the presentable lines down into a notebook marked with a songbird that she had taken from her backpack before once again clearing the board and replacing her thought process with a cute skull atop a jagged pattern.

Dawn stared at the symbol she drew. Reaching for her neck, she felt the choker around it, black and delicately circling her throat, separating her head and accompanying messy bob cut from the rest of her body. The angular pattern around her neck matched the one on the board perfectly, just as did the skull clip attached to it matched the caricature. Her symbol overlooked the room, a macabre stylization that marked the room as hers for the day.

"Fits perfectly, if I do say so myself. Helps that I designed it, of course..." Dawn eyed the board and some of the miscellaneous art and 'art' adorning it. "I feel like I should make a rule not to draw so many tasteless things. I guess that's what you get for giving free reign of a communal graffiti wall to a bunch of teenagers." She scanned the wall and erased the significant amount of ill spirited things and tasteless drawings. "That blonde, though; responsible for more than half of these," she mused, brushing the eraser over the last crude depiction of the male anatomy.

Dawn smiled regardless of her thoughts, once again falling into the chair and turning to her homework for the day. Three hours soon passed without significant event until the sky outside became noticeably darker. Eventually she looked up from her scroll, collected her things, silenced her speaker/flail/whatever-else-it-was and departed. She trounced out of the door and began walking without direction.

"You would think a pseudo-clubhouse would have more people in it on a Friday afternoon. Ah, well, I needed that report done anyway. I wonder if Ash has started—"

Dawn's thoughts were interrupted when she rounded a corner and nearly walked right into another student. After collecting herself, she excitedly bounced up.

"Hi, Colton!" the dark haired girl cheerily said to her fellow band member. "What's going on?"

"I was just coming to talk to you, actually. Mikado said he's free all day tomorrow, so we can actually do some work rather than not at all," responded Colton Sabat, a lanky man with long, messy, jet black hair and an excess of necklaces, rings and tattoos that drew the eye away from his scraggly uniform and appearance. The drummer of the Silent Songbirds adjusted the red circular spectacles covering his eyes and barely etched out a grin.

"We really need to coordinate our schedules better..." laughed Dawn, playfully tapping her finger on her chin, sarcastically evoking a thinker. "I've been working on some lyrics."

Her bandmate's face lit up as he began walking past her, patting her shoulder as he moved.

"Good to hear! I gotta take care a something today, otherwise I won't be free tomorrow."

Colton rounded a corner. "Tomorrow around 2 at the clubhouse!" he yelled back with a few rhythmic knocks on the wall.

"Sounds fine with okay you're gone that's fine," Dawn trailed off as she slung her bag over her shoulder and turned, somewhat dejectedly, back towards her original direction of nowhere.

"Finally, actual practice. I hope the club is empty tomorrow... Eh, maybe an audience wouldn't be that bad. I'll see what Mikado and Colton think. Might have to move somewhere else, though. Gah, why'd I have to go and make the one soundproof room into a hangout? Curse the school's love of alt rock!"

Dawn laughed to herself and continued to dwell on her thoughts until she realized she had no idea what she was doing and where she was going. Unbeknownst to her, she had stumbled outside and was passing by a path littered by trees on one side and dorm rooms to the left. Taking note of this, she fell into a nearby bench and stretched her arms, craning her ears to take in the ambient noise.

"This is where that lovely singing comes from." Dawn glanced at the numerous windows lining the walls of Beacon, some open to the world, some closed off with the blinds drawn, waiting and hoping to hear a girl's voice ring out from one of them. "Bluh, nothing today... I really need to figure out who that is and see if they feel like joining. I asked around, but I never did get her name..." She got up and began wandering again. "Then again, I guess operatic singing might not fit too well with a metal band. Still, maybe I could branch out a bit; Donnagan always said I had some serious range."

Dawn's oldest brother was the reason she had started singing in the first place, though she imagined that he hadn't envisioned her current alignment of genre. He and her other brother, Dougal, had taught her how to project her voice, how to stand tall with pride, and how to fight the hordes of Grimm with her confusing mismatch of a weapon that she had insisted on making to act as both an instrument of destruction and as a helpful assistant for a hard rock singer. Her older brothers had originally followed old style traditions and taught her to sing soft hymns and light poetic sings, but the force that her favorite bands sung with had directed her away from such flowery tunes in favor of rock. The confused but proud looks on their faces when she first did a cover of her favorite song cemented her current career path.

Dawn smiled as she thought of how her taste in music influenced her personality and her life. "Let's see, for one I'd be soooo bored. No hobbies. I would never have met Colton and Mikado... I wouldn't have hit it off so well with Evan... I would have never met any of the people who came to the clubhouse... Class without headphones would suck... Gah, the smallest things have the biggest influence. Lucky me I found my calling."

Dawn's inner reflection was cut off by the fact that she had unintentionally found herself at her dorm room, unlocking her door. She walked in to see Evan and Ashley turning toward her, sitting before a game over screen on a tv.

"Looks like that went well."

"I call lag," Evan muttered.

"Didn't you say we were offline? You just jumped off a cliff," responded Ashley, confused.

"Yes. And that's why you're adorable," chuckled Evan, placing her hand on her much smaller teammate's head. "For not believing my lies."

Dawn sighed. She pulled up a chair next to her teammates and plopped down.

"So what's going on here?" Dawn asked, looking at the mess of colors on the screen.

"Are you fighting the good fight, killing all the bad guys?"

Evan's face glowed with enthusiasm as she readjusted her controller. "Okay, so 'bad guys' is totally subjective, considering that there's like, eight different factions and none are really evil."

Dawn turned her head to the side, her confusion almost audible. "Please, go on."

Evan's voice became a blur as Dawn leaned back and entertained Evan, half listening to her seemingly impossibly complicated analysis of her game while Ashley sporadically interrupted, asking about various contrivances that resulted in even more enthusiastic explanations. Three of the four members of Team FADE spent the night discussing the plot line of a game that only one of them knew anything about until Evan began sputtering from a lack of breath.

"So, in short," the weary conversation leader said between gasps of air, "I'm playing the good guys. Now, I'm going to go back to playing before my voice explodes. You're welcome to watch and engage in the deep lore."

Dawn yawned, followed shortly by Ashley.

"I got band practice tomorrow, so I'll pass for now. I'm off to bed."

Ashley nodded in agreement before falling into her bed.

"Suit yourself, Crane. I'll turn the volume down."

Dawn readied herself and closed her eyes to the sporadic, yet therapeutic clacking ofEvan's controller. She smiled, thinking of tomorrow's practice session and her brothers' influence on her life before drifting off into blackness.

"I wonder who did the soundtrack for... Whatever Evan's game is called. Sounded great. I'm gonna have to look that up tomorrow."