Chapter Four: The College
It was a beautiful college at the start, full of rich colors and beautiful trees. A place where everyone wanted to come to learn, but just as much a place where everyone wanted to come to enjoy the view. Everyone who came to the college instantly fell in love with it, with its mahogany and cherry finishes on every wooden surface, and strong cast iron detailing on any support frame, it was impossible not to. It was not just the beauty of the college that drew people to it, the entire campus also had an atmosphere of mystery and adventure.
Some people thought it was the deep finishes of the wooden surfaces combined with the dark charcoal of the cast iron detailing that gave the college a slightly Gothic look that made the campus seem mysterious. Other people thought that it was just the fact that it was set far away from the rest of the town it was in that gave it its sense of adventure. However, no one knew the truth about why the campus was so mysterious. While we can never be certain why they decided to use the campus as their dwelling, the college turned out to be an ideal place for unknown elements to breed and live.
A lot of people reported mysterious occurrences, both good and bad, during their time on the campus. People complained of being pushed down stairs even though they were alone, of feeling like they had been hit despite no one being near enough to do so, and of waking up with bruises that they could not explain. However, this did not drive them to leave the school, as there was always more good than bad. Soon after bad experiences, people reported feeling at ease in the most tense situations, not feeling pain after getting hurt, and feeling more confident than they had in their entire lives before coming to the college. There were also a lot of reports of pranks being pulled but this was believed to be typical of any college student, though no one could ever find any student responsible for the pranks. Of course, all of these experiences were actually as a result of encounters with unknown elements.
I have searched endlessly for an answer as to why no one from our agency never looked into all the activity at the college. It was an extremely well documented site of unknown element activity and our agency should have had it listed as an immense threat to society. Our agency seems to have just ignored the activity at the college completely. This agency is known for its willingness to stop any and all unknown elements by any means necessary, they would not just ignore such a high area of activity. I find this highly suspicious, but since they are my employers and I have no proof of any wrongdoing, I have no choice but to ignore the gut feeling I have that something is wrong. I have a slight hope that I will uncover some answers to the questions I have about the college by aligning myself with the helpful unknown elements. However, I am not using them just to get answers, they have done far too much to help me for me to just use and exploit them in that way.
In the beginning, there were a lot of injuries and traumatic experiences at the hands of the harmful unknown elements. At that point, they had no desire for causing enough harm to another creature on the campus to result in death or serious injury, but they were not above hurting any creature if they were bored enough. The helpful unknown elements even tended to ignore them due to the lack of permanent harm they were causing. Eventually, though, the harmful unknown elements became bored with their activities and decided that they needed to escalate the pain and panic they were causing to a new level.
When the first death occurred, nobody thought anything of it. They thought it was a little strange that a student had fallen out of a third story window that was not even supposed to be unlocked, but they just assumed that someone had made a mistake and opened it and the student had simply tripped on something and fallen. Little did they know that the harmful unknown elements had learned to possess weaker students. They took control of the student's body, opened the window and walked the student out of it, laughing as the student fell to their death. The unknown elements remained unharmed, as they were protected inside the body of the student.
After the first student died, the unknown elements realized that they could gain more power from a death than they could from just physically harming creatures. They began plotting ways to gain the most energy in the least amount of time, while making sure that they would not be caught by our agency, officials in the area, or other unknown elements. They developed a system, one harmful unknown element would possess a student at a time. Once that harmful unknown element was inside of a student, they would decide whether the student was strong enough to be used to cause harm to others, or weak enough to be eliminated entirely.
If a student was determined strong enough to cause harm, the unknown element would use them to torture others until the student was noticed by the college officials and monitored. Once it was found out that a student was causing harm to others, the student was usually removed from the campus. Of course, they would tell the officials that they had no knowledge of performing the acts they were being accused of. They would be right in their claims, as an unknown element possession was never remembered by the victim. However, having proof that the student in question did perform the acts they were being accused of, the officials had no choice but to remove the student from their campus.
If the harmful unknown elements determined that a student was weak and must be eliminated, the unknown element possessing the student had a harder task. They would create the illusion that the student was depressed and not mentally stable. The student would appear to be contemplating suicide and over the course of a month, would give the impression that they were spiraling out of control. At the end of the harmful unknown element's time with the student, they would make the student end their own life, giving the impression that the student committed suicide.
After the helpful unknown elements noticed that students were dying as a result of the harmful unknown elements, they immediately began to take action. They learned to block the harmful unknown elements' attempts to possess students by assigning themselves to monitor all unknown elements on the campus. While they were able to prevent a large number of attacks from happening, resulting in the number of negative events that took place on the campus, they were never fully able to stop them.
After a few years of student deaths and attacks, the college was forced to start a formal investigation of the campus to figure out what was causing these events. They looked into the way the students were being treated by the staff, treatment of students by their peers, the environment the students were living in on the campus, and even the home lives of the students but they were never able to come up with an solid evidence proving what was causing the events to take place. The officials were very desperate to find a reason to deter new students from coming to the college, but they were unwilling to shut down the campus entirely. Eventually, any strange activity was written off as a haunting or some other form of paranormal or supernatural activity in hopes of scaring potential new students away. The problem was, the fact that the campus became known as a place of strange and unnatural activity just made it a more desirable to new students who wished to be witnesses to the activity firsthand.
With more people looking into going to the college and even trying to track down the places where attacks most frequently happened, the college found themselves attempting to deal with a huge problem. The officials were now responsible for people who were literally looking for trouble and wanting to be part of it. When these types of students started showing up at the college, the number of attacks and death actually decreased and the officials had no idea how it was happening. The reality of the situation was that the unknown elements were beginning to feel threatened by the people that were tracking down the sites of the events. These people were essentially attempting to track down their homes and were not intimidated by their actions, because of this, the unknown elements decided to decrease activity to avoid being found. Even the helpful unknown elements decided it was best to keep a low profile due to the high level of activity aimed directly at finding them.
After the students who were tracking down the strange events at the college realized that they were not getting the results they wanted, they left the college and returned to their previous lives. When the people started leaving, the unknown elements immediately took interest. They had begun to study the students very closely to learn as much as they possible could about them. As the unknown elements noticed the people they felt threatened by were leaving, they began to increase their activity once again. When the college saw that the number of attacks and deaths were starting to increase again, they finally had no choice but to close the college entirely. To the public, the officials were forced to announce this decision as a sudden financial downfall due to students leaving which left them unable to continue maintaining their facilities.