CHAPTER 28
~ Back to School ~

"Roxas," Xion's voice called out as if attempting to shake him out of a deep sleep. "Roxas, wake up! The Fangirls... they've..."

Before she could finish her sentence, the sound of a Fangirl alarm began to blare throughout the base... and then, just as quickly as it had begun, the sound changed its tone and volume entirely and faded away into an annoying little high-pitched beep.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep...

Roxas woke up, as he did every day, to the sound of his alarm clock blaring that same annoying tone over and over. The voice in his head, the warning, the image of some sprawling underground complex and the sound of an alarm going off... it had all been just a dream. There were no voices in his head now, and his surroundings were far more ordinary--a messy bedroom, with clothes strewn across the floor and furniture that hadn't been dusted off in weeks, appropriate for someone his age.

He groaned and turned the offending alarm clock off, then tossed his covers aside and climbed out of bed before scooping his school uniform up from the floor where he had left it the night before and hurriedly putting it back on. After scarfing down a quick breakfast, brushing his teeth, and packing his backpack with the handful of books he would need for the day, he grabbed his lunchbox and rushed out the door, heading off to school... just like any other day.

The trip to Thirteenth District High was never a long one--the school had, rather conveniently, installed apartments on the upper floors of the very same building where most classes were held, making it easy for the lazier students to sleep in until the last possible minute and yet still manage to get there on time. Roxas didn't even have to go outside to get there; a few flights of stairs and some brief walks down hallways, and he had arrived at Mr. Rimewind's science classroom.

Just before reaching the door, he suddenly noticed a smaller boy with spiky black hair headed straight toward him; if his reflexes had been just a split-second slower, they would have smacked into each other, but fortunately Roxas was able to take a step back and alert the other kid to his presence before that happened.

"Hey," the spiky-haired boy said, breathing a bit heavily and looking like he was having trouble carrying the weight of his overstuffed backpack. "Is this Biology with Mr. Rimewind?"

"Yeah," Roxas said, glancing into the open door in front of him before turning back to the boy. "Are you new here, or something?"

The boy nodded.

"Yeah, I just transferred in, and this is my first day here," he said, grinning and scratching his head. "I kinda got lost on the way over... oh yeah, I almost forgot to ask, what's your name?"

"Uh... Roxas," he said, pausing for a moment before figuring that it might be better to give the new kid his full name. "Roxas Siru."

"Roxas, huh? That's a weird name. Mine's Yoshi!"

Yoshi then rushed into the classroom before Roxas could say or do anything else, quickly picking a seat near the front of the class. As it turned out, this was not far from where Roxas usually sat; after standing in the hallway and watching other students file in for a few seconds, he shrugged and headed in as well, taking his usual seat.

The class went on as usual, though Mr. Rimewind (a surprisingly tall older man with long, dirty-blonde hair) seemed to be even more exhausted than usual; Roxas figured that the extra work due to being the school's only teacher for both math and science classes was finally beginning to catch up to him, as the dark circles under his eyes were even more noticeable than usual and he couldn't seem to get through half of the class period without pausing to drink large quantities of coffee. Before long, it was over, and as the students all wrote down their homework for the day their teacher slumped forward on his desk, mumbling something to himself about teacher's salaries and slave labor.

After the bell rang to mark the end of first-period classes, a deep voice suddenly came through over the intercom system; Roxas immediately recognized it as the voice of the school's principal, the dark-skinned, silver-haired man that most students only ever referred to as "the Principal," even if they knew his name.

"Good morning, students," he said, drawing out his words in a way that almost seemed excessive considering the subject of his speech. "This is your Sup--I mean, Principal speaking... I am pleased to announce that on this day, you shall all attend a mandatory meeting in the gymnasium for the purpose of choosing which clubs and other activities you will participate in during the coming year."

Yoshi turned toward Roxas for a moment and whispered somewhat loudly.

"Whoa, good thing I got here when I did," he said, causing Roxas to turn slightly in his direction and hope their teacher wasn't listening. "I wouldn't wanna miss that!"

"Now," the principal continued, "You shall all leave your classes and proceed to the auditorium in an orderly manner."

The flow of uniform-wearing kids toward the gym was, of course, anything but orderly; students of all ages and sizes swarmed out of their classrooms and headed down the hallways in noisy, obnoxious crowds, somehow managing to do so despite the fact that there seemed to be less than fifty of them in all. Roxas wondered for a moment why such a large school had such a small student body, but the thought quickly left his head as Yoshi tugged on one of his sleeves.

"Hey, you've been here for a while, right? What kinda clubs 'n' stuff does this place have?"

"Well... we should probably go to the gym and see," he said, shrugging slightly. Yoshi nodded, and before long the two had joined the amorphous crowd of students barreling down the hallway toward the double-doors that lead to the gym.

Once inside, the two boys were handed signup sheets by several teachers manning the entrance, then were left to their own devices, free to wander through the room and talk to the representatives of the various clubs and extracurricular activities the school offered. Yoshi glanced around at the booths set up by the martial arts club, the chess club, and Lucha Libre, which was actually being operated by a man wearing what appeared to be a real Mexican wrestling mask; off on the other end of the room was a small makeshift stage set up for a student-run band, which apparently was named "Organization XIII." An older student with a mullet-like haircut seemed to be in charge over there, spinning a large stringed instrument around and playing fragments of various rock songs as people passed by.

"Hey, what's this?", Yoshi asked, pointing to a club name on the signup sheet that didn't seem to have a booth set up anywhere in the room. "Larxene's Secret Fun Club... I wonder what they do?"

Roxas shuddered; he was pretty sure that this particular club's activities broke at least a few school rules (if not national laws), and that it most likely only had such a vague name because something called the "Larxene and Saix Have Weird Sex in the Janitor's Closet Club" would never fly with the teachers. He wouldn't be surprised if Saix's status as student body president was the only reason the school allowed it now, even with the... less-descriptive name.

"You don't want to join that one," he said, pulling a pen out of one of his pockets and crossing it off the list on Yoshi's sheet. "Trust me."

"Aww, why not? It has 'fun' right there in the name!", Yoshi whined, attempting to erase the black mark with his pencil's eraser but finding out that this didn't do much but smudge the ink. "I bet they do all kinds of stuff, like play video games! And have go-kart races! And burping contests!"

"Err... no... I'm pretty sure they don't," Roxas said, shaking his head and walking away from the boy to head off in the direction of the martial arts club's table, where a teacher wearing his hair in many long braids was demonstrating some of his techniques for a small crowd of young students. "Come on, let's forget about that and go check out a few of the booths."


Zexion stood against the wall of the gym while the other students milled around at the various booths around the edges, flipping through the massive book that he somehow knew how to summon out of thin air. He couldn't remember how or where he had gained such a strange power, but as far as he could remember, he had always been able to do so. He had also always been able to write things on the book's pages with his mind by simply waving a hand over the paper, causing words to appear instantly, which made him wonder why the book seemed to be completely empty--he had to have flipped through several dozen pages, and yet he had found nothing at all that had been written there previously.

"Hey Zexy," a girl's voice said from barely a foot away, "Whatcha doing?"

He glanced over in the direction of the voice and found a rather large-breasted girl staring right at him with a smile on her face, leaning in toward him as if trying to get a peek at what was in his book. Seeing little more than today's date written across the top of the page, she shrugged and quickly lost interest in it, though she continued to stand so close to Zexion that they were almost brushing up against each other.

"Ah... nothing much, Kisaki," he said, shrugging as well. "Just wondering about some things. Like my book... how is it that I can just summon a book out of nowhere like that?"

Kisaki giggled.

"What, did you forget already? Almost everybody here can do stuff like that, even the teachers!"

She was now leaning over onto him, her head resting on his shoulder. Some unconscious reaction made him flinch away a bit at first, but other than that he didn't react.

"Yes, I know that... I just can't remember why, if I ever knew at all."

Kisaki draped her arm over his other shoulder and hugged her smaller, blue-haired companion slightly, as if not concerned at all with the various questions he had. Apparently, she didn't find it unusual at all that there was a high school for people with unexplained superhuman powers located at the top of a mountain in Japan, or if she did she had gotten so used to it that it seemed ordinary to her.

"I wouldn't worry about it too much," she said, whispering into his ear and causing several younger students passing by to give the two some odd looks. "I mean, if you spend all your time worrying about weird stuff like that, won't your grades suffer?"

Zexion sighed.

"Yeah... I guess so," he mumbled, again barely fighting back an unexplainable instinctive urge to pull away from Kisaki despite the fact that the two had been dating for more than a year. "It's just... there's something really strange about this school, and I have to know what it is."

"Well... the Principal sure seems suspicious," Kisaki said, detaching herself from Zexion for a moment and stretching her arms slightly. "I mean, have you seen his eyes? They're so creepy!"

"Hmm... so you're saying that whatever's going on here, he might be responsible?"

Kisaki just shrugged.

"Nah," she said, smiling and beginning to fiddle with the hair that hung down in front of Zexion's face, which caused him to turn away slightly. "He's just kinda creepy-looking, that's all. You don't really think anything weird's going on around here, do you?"


Xaldin sighed and sorted through the pile of papers in front of him, struggling to get them all graded and arranged before the club and activity meeting in the gym finished up and the next wave of students came pouring into his classroom. Just as he had reached the last of them, the bell rang, and he slapped his forehead with one hand and groaned. English wasn't even his first language--so why in the name of all that is holy did the Principal give him the job as Thirteenth District High's only English teacher? He just didn't understand the school system's decisions sometimes.

"Hey, could be worse," he thought to himself as he rushed through the grading for the last essay, hoping he didn't miss anything obvious in the process. "They could've piled two subjects on me like they did to poor Vexen... man, I feel sorry for that guy."

Outside the room, the chatter of students approaching in the hallways rapidly grew closer and closer. Just a few minutes before the tardy bell was about to ring, a small crowd wandered into Xaldin's classroom, and he hurriedly sorted the papers into alphabetical order in preparation for handing them back.

"Aw, man," Demyx said, glancing over at a skinny spiky-haired boy and a rather overweight one with an afro. "You mean you guys couldn't get Slobodan to sign up for Lucha Libre? It'd be perfect! I mean, he's already got his own mask and everything!"

Axel shrugged and shook his head.

"Nah... the guy just wasn't interested," he said, glancing to the other two for a moment before continuing. "Honestly, I'm a little surprised you bothered to sign up, Tundo. What, did you think it was a sumo wrestling club or something?"

"Hey! You callin' me fat, punk?"

"Break it up, children," Zexion muttered, sighing at the antics of his fellow students as he walked past them and sat down in the front row. The other three who had entered before him headed straight toward the back, unsurprisingly.

"Lemme see," Xaldin mumbled to himself, looking over the roll sheet in front of him. "Axel, Demyx, Zexion, Tundo... okay, so we're just missin' Larxene, Marluxia, and Vi now. They've got another minute, then I'm gonna have to mark 'em late..."

He glanced back up to the classroom again and found that Larxene had inexplicably appeared in the room in the time it had taken him to glance down and mark her four fellow students present, apparently running into the room with such speed that he hadn't noticed her. He nodded slightly in her direction and marked her off as well, then turned toward the door and waited for any sign of the remaining two. At the last second, Vi came through the door; the tardy bell rang and still Marluxia was nowhere to be seen.

"Whoa," Demyx said, glancing around the room and finding no sign of his pink-haired classmate. "Where is that guy? He's never this late..."

Xaldin was about to close the door when suddenly the last missing student came sliding to a stop right in front of it, slipping through the door just as the sound of the bell finally stopped. This earned him a brief glare from the elven teacher, but still, he technically wasn't late, so he marked him present on the attendance sheet before returning to his desk.

"Okay, you guys," he said, scooping up the stack of essays and walking over to the front row of students to hand them out, "I just got done gradin' these things you turned in last week... lemme know if I marked anything wrong, I was in a hurry toward the end."

"Uh, Mr. Xaldin?", Demyx blurted out, raising one hand after the fact. "What if I... um... y'know... forgot to turn mine in? Because I think I kinda... did."

Xaldin turned toward him and frowned.

"I've told ya before," he said, walking over toward the back of the class where Demyx's desk was located. "I ain't Mr. Xaldin... just Xaldin. Elves don't use last names, remember?"

He plopped a graded paper onto his desk, then moved on to the next student on the list.

"Doesn't look like you forgot that paper after all," he said, "Must've been some other assignment you were thinkin' of there."

Demyx groaned; he knew he had forgotten to do something, but he couldn't remember what. Axel snickered a bit, though this died down a bit when he flipped his paper over and saw that the grade was significantly lower than Demyx's, quickly flipping it back to its previous face-down position so that nobody else would see.


In the closed stall of one of the school's bathrooms, Xigbar woke up to find his face resting on a toilet seat. Apparently, he had passed out drunk again--and in just about the worst place, aside from right in the middle of class of course. He stood up and yawned, rubbing one of his eyes slightly; it was then that he noticed a brown paper bag on the floor next to him and picked it up, immediately finding that it held a rather large bottle of liquor that he had completely emptied.

"Oh yeah," he mumbled, pulling the bottle out of its hiding place. "That'd explain it..."

Shrugging, he tossed both bag and bottle into the nearest trash can as he left the bathroom stall, stopping by one of the sinks on his way out and taking a look into the mirror. His eye widened as he saw something that didn't make one bit of sense--his hair was starting to go gray in wide streaks.

"Wait, gray hair? What the hell?"

On closer inspection, this wasn't the only thing wrong. Despite the fact that he was a senior in high school, many parts of his face were marked with rather visible signs of age; he was even beginning to get wrinkles, for crying out loud! He also noticed a large scar on the left side of his face that he could not explain, in addition to the fact that he was wearing an eyepatch. What kind of high school student wears an eyepatch?

"Okay... probably just wearin' that while I was drunk to look cool, like I'm a pirate or somethin' dumb like that. Lemme see what's under that little mother--gah!"

He closed his other eye and flinched away from the mirror, putting his eyepatch back on as quickly as possible. He had not wanted to see that, though the sight of his obviously non-functional right eye did serve to snap him even further out of his booze-addled state. How the hell could he have gotten so banged-up and not remembered any of it?

Xigbar stared at his image in the mirror for several more seconds, then turned away and headed down the hallway, wondering what the hell was going on. Before he could wander to his next class, the lunch bell rang and immediately a mob of uniformed students cleared out of the nearest classrooms and headed for the double-doors that marked the entrance to the cafeteria.

"Hey," he shouted down the hallway to catch the other students' attention. "Can any of you kids tell me what the hell is going on here?"

Most of the group just stopped and stared at him for a few seconds, then hurried into the cafeteria as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened; a few laughed it off as nothing more than Xiggy the class drunk having another one of the booze-fueled outbursts he had become famous for, wondering if his brother Saix, the student council president, would have to go talk to the Principal to get him out of trouble again. Only one of the unusually old-looking elf's fellow students came forward, summoning a heavy-looking book with a flash of dark blue energy as he approached.

"That's exactly what I've been wondering," Zexion said, flipping the lexicon open to a page near the middle which, oddly, seemed to have some things written on it despite the fact that all of the previous pages were completely blank. "Our unexplained powers, the apartments built into the campus, half the teachers in mismatched positions... something is definitely wrong here."

"Yeah, like the fact that I'm frickin' old," Xigbar grumbled. "I'm supposed to be eighteen goddamn years old, finishin' up my last year in this place... and here I am, lookin' like some kinda scarred-up old geezer!"

Zexion paused for a moment. That was something he hadn't noticed before; now that he thought about it, he had seen quite a few students who seemed far too old to still be in high school. Even he couldn't have possibly been much younger than twenty or so, just going by his appearance, and yet somehow he was a high school junior. Others, like Marluxia, Axel, and especially Xigbar, appeared to be even older, and as far as he knew nobody was suffering from some sort of rapid-aging disease that might have explained such an inconsistency. The more he looked into his suspicions about the school, the more things just didn't seem to work.

"Xigbar... I'm going to be too busy, so do you think you could do me a favor here?"

The elf scratched one of his ears for a second, then answered.

"Eh... what kinda favor you talkin' about?"

"Nothing much," Zexion said, writing something down in his book and then causing the page to disconnect from the rest of the book and float over to Xigbar. "Just go around during lunch, asking as many of your fellow students as you can about the things I've listed on this page. There's bound to be someone else in this place who's noticed that something strange is going on."

Xigbar snatched the floating page out of midair and quickly looked it over, mumbling a few things to himself as he went. He then looked back to Zexion and nodded, walking past him and heading toward the double-door into the cafeteria after the last few stragglers arriving from classes somewhere on the other side of the school.

"Sure," he said, grinning slightly, "No problem, Captain Scud."


By the time lunch was over, Xigbar had bounced around to each of the tables, sitting down with each of Thirteenth District High's various subcultures and asking everyone about all sorts of things that Zexion had put down on the sheet of paper, trying to see if anyone had noticed things about the school that just didn't seem right. Unfortunately for him, however, it seemed that most of the school's student body hadn't been paying enough attention to such things to really have much to say; they seemed to want to explain away most of the inconsistencies with some mundane explanation, claiming that the school's teachers seemed mismatched to their subjects because the place must have had to cut some of its faculty due to funding problems, or that older-looking students just matured earlier or had rough childhoods that made them that way. Still others dismissed his words simply because of his reputation as the school drunk, always going around rambling about something random or saying things just to mess with people.

However, his mission was not entirely a failure. When the lunch bell rang and he waited outside in the hallway at the meeting-place he had designated for all those interested in figuring out what was wrong with the school, several of his fellow students did arrive; Roxas was the first to join him, ducking behind the vending machine where Xigbar waited just in time to keep Yoshi from spotting him and tagging along despite the fact that he didn't seem interested in looking into the mysteries of the school.

"So," the boy said, peeking around the side of the machine at the one-eyed elf, "What're we gonna do now?"

"Heh... well, first of all, we're gonna wait and see if anybody else shows up."

As the last of the lunch crowd left the room, Zexion came back from one of the hallways leading to the other side of the school, joining Xigbar and Roxas. Not long afterward, another younger student walked up to Xigbar and stared up at him nervously, apparently finding it difficult to even speak. Roxas immediately recognized her, stepping out from behind the vending machine and addressing her by name.

"Naminé? Are you okay?"

"Yes... I'm fine," she said, sighing slightly and rubbing her forehead with one of her tiny hands as if she was developing a headache. "But... my memories... no, everyone's memories..."

"Memories?", Roxas said, pausing a bit. "What do you--"

Xigbar's one good eye widened as he suddenly remembered: Naminé had power over memory, allowing her to look into anyone's memories with just a glance into their eyes.

"She's sayin' that something screwed our memories all to hell," he grumbled, slamming the vending machine beside him with one fist and leaving behind a sizable dent. Seconds later, a can of soda inside came rolling out, apparently dislodged by the force of the blow. "That'd explain why I can only remember bein' around for eighteen damn years even though I look... what, forty-somethin'? Maybe fifty?"

"That's right," Naminé said, closing her eyes briefly and seeming to focus on something. She then opened them up once again, shaking her head. "Everyone's memories seem... damaged, unnatural somehow. I can't even look anyone in the eye without getting this horrible feeling that something about them is just... wrong."

"Naminé," Zexion said, "Isn't it true that you have the power to alter memories as well?"

She nodded.

"Yes... but that takes time," she said, flinching slightly as her eyes met Zexion's and disjointed fragments of his childhood memories flashed through her mind with pieces obviously missing. "I think I could undo the changes and fix your memories, but... it could take hours, even days to reverse all the damage."

"It's really that bad?", Roxas asked. "I mean... I did think it was weird that I remember being here last year, even though I'm a freshman, but..."

The tiny girl turned toward Roxas, glancing into his eyes for a moment and looking through his memories. She was surprised to find that he didn't even seem to have a full two years' worth of memories to begin with; from what she could see, he couldn't remember anything but his time in this strange school, but something about his missing childhood memories seemed different from the damage that had been done to everyone else's.

"Roxas... your memory, it's..."

The boy blinked, backing away a bit as Naminé reached one hand out toward his forehead. Zexion stopped him, stepping in behind him and allowing the girl to touch him in hopes that this might aid her reading of his memories in some way.

"There's damage to your recent memories," she said, closing her eyes and focusing on sifting through the connections between events in Roxas' life. "They've all been changed to be related to this school, just like everyone else here. But... this isn't the first time your memory's been altered, Roxas."

Xigbar looked a bit confused by this revelation. Though he admittedly didn't know much about how the girl's powers worked, he had never thought that she would be able to tell just how many times someone's memories had been changed.

"Wait, what's this now?"

"She claims Roxas' memory has been altered more than once," Zexion said matter-of-factly. "Unlike the rest of us, who have apparently only had our memories meddled with this one time."

Xigbar shot a glare at the smaller man.

"Yeah, yeah... I got that part, smartass. Still not quite sober here, remember?"

Zexion sighed.

"So what now?", he asked, glancing from Xigbar to the younger two who had joined him. "It's clear that something has happened to us, rearranging our memories and planting us here in this bizarre school... but who is the culprit, and why would anyone do such a thing?"

"Yeah... it's strange," Roxas said, staring off down the empty hallway. "Somebody had the power to rewrite our entire lives, and all they did with it was put us in some high school... what kind of freak would go through all this trouble just for that?"

"Good question," Xigbar said. "Whoever it is, they've gotta be pretty damn stupid... what kinda moron would try to get me to pass for a teenager?"

The bell announcing the next class rang, but none of those who had gathered around the slightly-dented drink machine moved; the mysteries surrounding the school had become far more interesting for them than school itself, and they weren't about to postpone their investigation just to sit in some boring classroom and rot away until the day was over.

"Hmm... this could give us an advantage," Zexion said, putting his hand to his chin. "If my theories are correct, whoever did this to us will be busy watching the drama between students and their daily routines play out, manipulating our lives for some sick form of entertainment..."

He summoned his book once again, writing a few things down and making a small chart displaying the layout of the school, with some vague malevolent figure hovering over it and focusing its attention on the classrooms.

"Which means that if we skip class for the rest of the day and avoid places where students gather... we will essentially be able to slip under their notice and search the entire school for clues as we please."

"Maybe that way I'll have time to fix your memories," Naminé said, glancing at her three companions one by one. "If whoever changed them isn't watching... then it might be safer to try, I think."

Zexion nodded.

"Perhaps," he said. "You might also want to see if your power can affect my lexicon as well. While the information it contains may not technically be memory in the strictest sense, it does seem to have been affected as well."

He held up the book and caused dozens of blank pages to flip by, eventually stopping on one page where a short paragraph remained. Further down the page, after another vast blank space, was one lonely sentence that seemed completely out of context; flipping through a few more pages, it seemed clear that whatever had altered Zexion's memory had also wiped the majority of what he had previously written in the book he carried.

"It... it feels the same," Naminé said, staring at the book's pages just as she always stared into the eyes of those whose memories she examined. "Looking at this writing... it seems damaged and unnatural, just like your memories. I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything for it... but I'll try."

"Well, now that that's settled," Xigbar said, leaning against the drink machine and guzzling down the last few drops of the soda he had inadvertently stolen before, "Don't you guys think we oughta get to work on this thing, and not just stand around talkin' in the halls like a buncha gossipy teenagers?"


"Ah... let's see," Vexen mumbled, half-consciously going over attendance while steadying himself against his desk with one hand to prevent his tired and sleep-deprived body from falling over. "Saix, present... Xigbar, absent... undoubtedly passed out drunk in some far corner of the school again, knowing him."

His eyes almost slipped shut for a moment before he forced them open, pausing to gulp down another full cup of coffee in an attempt to keep himself focused long enough to at least take down his attendance records for the day. He continued down the list where he had left off, starting on the students who (unlike the two elves) actually had last names.

"Zexion Boccaccio... absent?", he said, raising an eyebrow as he stared across the classroom. "How strange. That boy's had perfect attendance until today..."

At this point, he nearly collapsed onto his desk, only barely catching himself at the last moment. It was clear that the coffee just wasn't enough; having to teach the school's entire math and science curriculum (and grade every last test) was taking its toll on Vexen, and nothing short of a break from his duties would solve his sleep problems now. He staggered away from the desk, handing the clipboard where the roll sheet was located to a tall, masked student as he passed the front rows.

"Slobodan, if you would," he said, grabbing the doorknob and sleepily attempting to turn it the wrong way several times before finally just yanking the entire thing off its hinges and setting it aside. "Please... take attendance and hand out last week's tests for me. I'm not feeling well..."

He stumbled out of the classroom, supporting himself on the wall as he walked down the hallway toward... nowhere in particular, just as long as it wasn't yet another classroom. He then remembered that the school did indeed have a nurse's office, and staggered his way down the halls in an attempt to find it. He eventually reached his destination, but passed out just feet away from the door, falling with a heavy thud on the tile floor at his feet with one hand outstretched in the direction of the door.

When Vexen came to, he was not lying on the floor but in a rather comfortable bed. He stood up where he was lying and found that he was inside the school nurse's office, tucked away into one of the beds in the office's back room which were usually reserved for sick students. He briefly thought that the bed seemed strangely large and comfortable for a school nurse's office, but he had no complaints about that; the bed was comfortable, after all, and though he wasn't sure how long he had been there, he seemed to have slept well enough that he no longer felt like falling over out of exhaustion.

"Oh, Mr. Rimewind," an unfamiliar voice said from the main office, coming from a blonde-haired woman sitting in a rolling chair in front of a computer. "Sounds like you're finally up. Feeling any better now?"

"Well... yes, yes I am," he mumbled, pushing aside the covers and getting out of the bed. "But... who, may I ask, are you?"

"Oh, I suppose we haven't been introduced just yet," the woman said, finally turning around to face him for a moment before hopping out of her chair and walking toward him. Unlike all of his fellow teachers, the school's principal, and even most of the students, Vexen couldn't remember her at all. "They only hired me this week, after all."

Upon sight of her, Vexen could immediately tell that she was much younger than the rest of the school's faculty and staff; the busty blonde standing in front of him must have just finished college before being picked for this job, as she couldn't have possibly been any older than her mid-twenties. She looked younger than some of his students, for crying out loud! He found a grin unconsciously creeping across his face; she seemed to vaguely remind him of someone he had met before long ago, but no matter how hard he tried to think back, no clear memories came to mind.

The nurse took one look at Vexen's face and smirked, reaching up and beginning to unbutton her shirt as she approached him. Immediately, Vexen's eyes widened; at this point, he wondered if this was all just a dream and he was going to suddenly wake up once again and find himself lying on the cold floor outside the office. With his luck, the nurse's office would probably turn out to be closed for the day already, with nobody inside at all.

"You're a dirty old man," she said, continuing to walk toward the back room of the nurse's office in what almost seemed to be slow motion. "Aren't you... Mr. Rimewind?"

Vexen's grin, which had briefly faded from his face at the thought that this might be nothing more than a dream brought on by many days of sleep deprivation, returned wider than ever. For just a second, he had considered pinching himself like some sort of cartoon character to see if he would awaken from the sudden jolt of pain, but he quickly reconsidered; if this was a dream, it appeared that it was going to be one of the best ones he'd had in quite a while.