Next chapter for you guys, out about on time for once! Reviews are accepted and valued! I haven't done a disclaimer in a while, but I don't own POTO.


Erik smirked at her retreating figure. Thinking aloud could be quite embarrassing, as her moment was quite exemplary for that. She thought he could read minds of all things! It was quite amusing that she would think that of him, for, as far as he knew, he had given her no cause to believe such thoughts. His smile became slightly more visible, had anyone been watching, as he wondered whether or not her thoughts were always as disjointed as she had spoken them to be. It seemed to him that she had too much on her mind at any given moment to truly complete a thought sentence. If nothing more, that would explain all the fragmented sentences. Most of the spoken thoughts he had heard lacked the principle parts of speech. Only three or so of the sentences that she had spoken had been complete. If nothing else, many fewer than had she thought about what she had been saying.

Although, he supposed that he should not be judging Maria on her thought processes. He was not one to argue, though he did normally complete his thoughts before straying to another. Not that focusing on one topic was hard, but it was much more interesting to have a few thought trains running at once, so when he got tired with the topic at hand he could simply switch to a background thought and continue thinking about the original topic while focusing on the new one. Erik did have to admit to himself that it was quite bad when he could not remember which thought he was supposed to be focusing on and they all came together in a large jumbled mess of knots and thoughts. It could take minutes for him to finally sort out what he meant to think, and by then, it usually was of little importance anymore. Not that this happened often, mind you. Simply, every once in a while. He was not quite sure of how he physically reacted to the thought crashes, and was not sure if he even did. Probably, he simply stood there like a statue, waiting for them to organize themselves. But that simply did not seem quite right to him. It was a feeling, perhaps one from experience. He could not tell. Whatever the case, standing like a statue when he lost his thoughts did not seem correct. No, definitely not. Venting sounded better. Much like a worse form of desiring to yell at that old organist (who he had learned to be in the security department as well- the man had his own school security golf cart). A much worse form of organist beating. He was not sure how he could tell this, but one thing was for sure, he did not want to let his thought trains collide; it would not turn out well for anyone.

It would certainly be nice to have his memory back. Then he could remember his life, and all of his background thoughts would make sense. Background thoughts that he found to be rather disturbing, not only that he would be thinking them, but of what they were themselves. They could have been more strange, he supposed, but the oddness of them from his current manner of thinking was quite shocking. In fact, they were different enough from his present state of mind that they could have come from another person entirely. A slightly insane person, to say the least. A self-deprecating person too. Perhaps, if he were to regain his memory, then he could think of where these thoughts had come from, whether they had been planted in his head by others, or whether he thought such things himself. He hoped that they were there because of the former option- he did not want to think of himself as insane. But really, there was no choice in the matter of saneness. Either you are insane, or you are sane. There is no grey area between the two. At least, there was no grey area or blurred line that he knew of. Perhaps there is. Really, it is useless thinking about it unless you are there in that nonexistent area, which would be quite hard, given that it has not been proven that there is such a thing as a line between sanity and insanity. The memories, the background thoughts, were not on such a blurred line; he would have welcomed that. No, they were decidedly crazy. Crazy and depressing.

Monster was the first word that came to him from those thoughts. Monster, followed by devil's child, followed by the living death, or as he thought of it, le mort vivant. These titles, if he was to call them anything, were not directed at any creature other than himself, hence the self-deprecating and rather depressive nature of these background thoughts. Truly, he had no good reason to call himself a monster that he knew of, nor devil's child, or even the living death. They must have been given to him by someone, but who would go out of their way to give such a name to him? If he was their monster, would they not simply have chosen to kill him or be rid of him when they had the chance? Really, it made no sense that he would think of himself these names unless he deserved them. Unfortunately, there was no way to discover the absolute meaning behind any of them, given that he had no memory. It was quite disorienting, in a way, not even being able to remember who made you think of yourself as a monster in the back of your head. Of course, there were many other names that differed from monster or devil's child, but all of them that he could think of had a rather negative connotation, if not downright bad. Trap-door lover? Angel of death? (That one was not one that he really wanted to know the story behind, but one that he certainly would need to.) The red death. O.G (Odd initials, given that his were actually E.D) And the last one that popped up, which he surprisingly was not okay with, even though it sounded much better than all the others, was angel of music. He was not sure why he did not like the angel of music thing, as it was quite a large amount better than the other titles floating around his head. Yet, in it's own way, it was worse than even monster or angel of death. Angel of death... he was not sure if he desired to explore the meaning of that further than what he already knew, which was nothing. Although he was loathe to admit it, living would possibly be easier if he chose ignorance over knowledge- for then, you could not have guilt or anxiety over the past when you do not know what has happened. As he has heard people say, ignorance is bliss.