Quote of the Week: "I fear for my life." - Colleen

Well, after months and months of badgering my mother to take me to the department of motor vehicles, I finally have my driver's permit. It took a grand total of four minutes for me to pass the test. Now I know why the stupidest buffoons can become president. XD

It went downhill slowly, at first. Nothing really seemed to happen until the first few days of March. Even afterwards, only the faintest glimmers gave any indication of what was really happening -- whether it was from intervention on part of the faculty or some other unknown reason, remained undetermined.

The presence became so normal around the dorm, and presented itself so slowly, that none of them paid any special attention to it; after all, the aura surrounding the school was a constant kaleidoscope of spiritual and demonic energy. Whatever it was that was going around the school, the amassed energy of the student body changed to adapt the situation.

They only started to worry when they saw it, solid and real, floating around the stairway banisters. A little orb of light, so faint that one thought it was only a trick of the eyes.

"I don't like it," Jin finally stated one day, watching the orb go about its business on the staircase. The others only rolled their eyes, and Hiei gave his own complimentary snort of annoyance. Kurama, not quite feeling so unthreatened, himself, tried his best to keep the other's comments from getting too harsh.

"Now, now," he placed a hand on Jin's shoulder, giving a stern look over at Yusuke and Lark (who were about ready to wallop the wind master for worrying over something so unimportant as a bit of loose spirit energy floating around). "It's bound to move on soon."

But it didn't go. In fact, every day, it grew a little brighter, a little more solid. At this, Jin only gave the others a knowing look, hoping that Yusuke at least, once a ghost himself, would get a clue. Going on with their everyday lives, they ignored him.

Then the footsteps started: big heavy clunking up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, as if someone in combat boots was having a game of hopscotch on the wooden staircase. On the night they started, Kyuro, the lightest sleeper of them all, was out of Holly's room in a flash, and soon batting at Yusuke and Kuwabara's noses. Once they were awake, the cat familiar gave them a grumpy little lecture and told the boys to check the stairs.

Quite disagreeably, they focused their own glowing energy in their palms, lighting up the room -- and the empty beds of Hiei and Kurama (one was currently pulling an all-night studying stint at the library, and the other was who-knows-where). Grumbling and mumbling, they padded out to the staircase landing, and focused the beams of light down the stairs.

Victoria stared back at them, face obscured by the strange barred shadows of the banister, having just snuck over from the room he shared with Erika. But his gaze wasn't quite focused on them, per say. The stomping had not stopped, but continued at a rather soft volume. What faced the three humans and cat familiar was not an intruder of any sort, however.

Floating in midair, moving as if pacing on the stairs, the little orb of light continued its rounds.

This indeed puzzled them, but there was nothing in their power that they could do; quite confused, with their brains circling around their heads at the rough guesstimated speed of a million miles per hour, as Victoria ordered them back to bed, they buried themselves under the blankets and tried to ignore the noise. As they flipped over in their beds and wracked their brains trying to come up with a logical excuse, the orb continued it's stomping with glee.

Things soon progressed so quickly, that it seemed second nature to hear about new events occurring in the dorms and classrooms. The chairs liked to stack themselves in physically impossible towers down in the basement storeroom of Ryo's classroom tower; the youngsters regularly saw a kindly old deerfolk man down by the pond and watched him fish, conversing with him as if he wasn't invisible to everyone else; in the dining room of one of the girl's dorms, a strange sensation came over anyone who entered and made them immensely nauseous - but the feeling disappeared as soon as the sickly person stepped through the door.

Temperatures dropped, light bulbs flickered, pens went flying across the rooms, students had sudden fits of sickness caused by crippling nightmares, digital wristwatches would suddenly short-circuit in one minute and be fine the next. None of it made sense, and the teachers, although they did their best to fix the problem on hand, didn't seem bothered in the least over the current turn of events.

Perhaps it was the total lack of reaction over the mishappenings that frightened the students, instead of the occurrences themselves. A number of teachers seemed more alert than others, and didn't take any chances. One such was Shikyo; all it took was the feeling of being watched, of being pressured by something unknown, -- and the same sensation was felt by everyone in the room -- for him to move his classes outside. Although he claimed it was just to experience the spring weather, both Lark and Chrysanthemum noticed the discreet protection circled drawn with extra fertilizer (in a slightly different shade of blue than the rest) and nearly hidden underneath the grass.

The weeks went by, February changing to March, the snows melting and dotting the pathways with large water puddles. They carried on without a care, doing work and keeping up with Mara's rapid growth spurt, every so often hearing a new piece of brow-raising news, and, again, telling Jin to shut his trap whenever the demon was about to put in his own two bits about the new information.

By the end of the first week of March, the little orb had changed. No longer was it a tiny ball of light, floating about and generally just causing innocent havoc during the night. Thudding footsteps were nothing compared to what was in the works, here.

It began, innocently enough, when Lyonell stopped by to drop off an assignment for Rogerik; the thief had come down with an unusual spring case of the flu. Kurama had only opened the door when he noticed the normally placid look in the cat twin's eyes disappear, to be replaced with one of fear and confusion. The book had been thrust in Kurama's hands, but not before the fox noticed how Lyonell's fur and hair bristled, how the book was placed into his hands with prominent claw marks in the thick carboard cover, and the cat's tail nearly three times it's size as he walked away. Looking out the bay window in the living room, Kurama watched the cat demon take off in a sprint.

The entire atmosphere changed then, if only for a second, and Kurama turned towards the stairs. Nothing. Not even the little floating and glowing sphere.

The book was passed off, with much good-natured griping from Rogerik, and all seemed normal again. Until Kurama climbed the stairs again after dinner, and felt the drowning pressure swamp him.

"It's getting worse," Jin muttered, matter-of-factly, one weekend as the others sat around the TV eating chips and dip and watching B-rated Sci-Fi movies. Lark only rolled her eyes and turned the volume up enough so the screams of the genetically mutated Shrimp-Scorpion hybrid's victims drowned out her thoughts. Holly only gave Jin a sympathetic look, but wasn't willing to put her neck on the line against Lark. In the end, the wind master couldn't blame her: she slept in the same room as the water manipulator, after all, and she didn't need Lark to be angry at her the entire weekend. They left that sort of self-sacrifice to Lyra, who had a knack for calming her sister down, and to Rogerik, who was a good enough scapegoat for those sorts of events.

"You're imagining things." Was all Lark offered, trying to immerse herself in the horrible screen acting as best she could. Yusuke rolled his eyes and Kyuro only sadly shook his head. There was no way they imagined the pervasive feeling that followed them around the house. It had gotten to the point that Koryu, if he hadn't felt the obligated pull to attempt to protect Lyra best he could, was loath to even stick his head inside the kitchen window. If that wasn't a sign something was wrong, what was?

And then their sign showed up, one night when Rogerik had to rush to the first-floor bathroom in order to puke off the "Return of the Flu", and he passed the staircase. What he saw made him stop in his tracks, and swallow down the bile that had been rising in his throat.

He'd been used to the orb, had even talked to it once or twice during his night-time trips to go tango with the toilet (as the lingo went) when the fever was getting to him, and wasn't nearly as bothered by it as he knew he should have been. What stood in its' place was something that made every hair in his body stand up and forced adrenaline to pump through his veins. Sick or not, on the sheer power of the chemicals mixing in his veins, he was sure he could've ran a marathon.

It was just standing there, motionless and as innocent as it could possibly be - the thing got the motionless part down far better than the feeling of innocence - staring straight at him.

Correction: it would be staring straight at him if it's entire head didn't consist of a bottomless black hole peering out from underneath the hood of a black sweatshirt.

Malice rolled off of it in waves, making vomit gurgle back up in his throat again and cause his legs to go limp as if his bones had suddenly been replaced with the tofu replica of a human skeleton. Around it, the air shimmered with spirit energy, and its aura reached even the bottom of the stairs, where Rogerik stood, dumbfounded. Just as suddenly as it had made it's stomach-lurching appearance, however, it blinked out of existence right before Rogerik's eyes. The stomping of heavy boots heralded its exit.

His stomach strangely settled, all of a sudden, Rogerik scurried back to his basement bedroom, making sure to close the door tight and give a begging glance over to the glow-in-the-dark gargoyle statuette that he'd found in an old box of junk from the previous tenants and had stationed on the last step. The grotesque, hyena-like face calmed him much more than that soulless void of hate.

"So, where's that necromancer when you need him?" Rogerik grumpily downed his orange juice in one gulp as soon as Lark came down the stairs.

"Shut up, you."

It had been a good few days since Rogerik's last bout of the flu and his spotting of the malignant spirit on the stairwell. At first, no one had taken it seriously, and for good reason, considering he had been a bit delirious later on that night when his temperature had spiked; but, the very next night, it had been spotted by Lyra and Kurama. Just a day after that, the dark thing had progressed from stairwell hauntings to actually moving up and down the hall, and it was getting more daring every night.

Just last night, for instance, Lark and Holly had been awoken by their door suddenly flying open and crashing into the wall -- the first thing they had seen was that empty void, sucking them in and crushing them against the forces of gravity all at the same time. Any suspicions or doubt they'd once held was gone.

From the living room, Holly gave the stairs a cautious look and offered, "It's just a really creepy spirit. At least it isn't physically violent."

"Yet," Kyuro added. The black cat's eyes flicked over the stairs, and he bristled, just as Embyr came around the hallway corner, her nose once again in a book. Without any caution at all, she trotted down the steps, not even paying attention to where her feet were going. The morning routine was so normal, that no one even bothered to watch her. Except the familiar.

His piercing gaze never strayed as the young kitsune, taken completely off-guard, was flung down the stairs. As the two girls shrieked and ran to Embyr's side, Victoria burst through the French doors of his shared room, and Rogerik blinked in slow surprise before finally crashing into reality and rushed for an icepack, nothing escaped the cat.

Especially not the black shadow that hovered over the stairs, face hidden underneath a hood.

"...In like a lion," the familiar intoned. He doubted the end of this would compare to any fuzzy lamb.

Since that meeting in February, where the necromancer had added his own advice to her problem solving, Rachel had been wondering what to do with the large amount of students over the vacation. Although a good number of them would return to their family for the weeklong vacation, an equally large amount of the student population chose to go on the field trips or didn't have a home to go back to. Obviously, not every student left at the campus could go on a field trip, and this presented quite the dilemma. Just what would she do with those extra students?

Leaving them on-campus, like what usually happened, was out of the question with Michealangelo's gargantuan exorcism planned for that week. The school couldn't afford for all of them to the mountain-springs that had been rented to them.

She turned the corner of the office hallway, and made a rather ungraceful attempt to dodge Shikyo as the cat demon was caught in her path of rampage. In fact, he wasn't the first faculty she had come across in her mad pacing; what made her stop and finally stare at him was when he asked her what was wrong. That, and the fact he had gone into a bought of hopping on one leg when she accidentally bumped into him, claiming that he had only gotten the cast off earlier that week and already he was being attacked again.

"What do you think! The vacation! We have way too many students than we can handle."

"Oh," was all he could say, quite out-of-touch with her fragmented reply. Nursing his sore leg, he continued, "In any case, would you happen to have seen Ms. Hisagawa? She was supposed to run by my apartment and drop off those progress reports."

"Apartment..?"

"In town," he answered, and gingerly tried to limp off the throbbing pain in his shin. "What, did you think I slept underneath my desk every night?"

As he looked over at the headmistress, he could already see the gears turning in her head. "...Crap."

"No, not crap. I just got a good idea..." Rachel pursed her lips, working out the details even as Shikyo looked at her as if she had suddenly poked him with a cherry-red cattle brand.

"Please tell me this doesn't involve me in any way."

"No, you're still chaperoning the field trip." Before the teacher could sigh in relief, though, she carried right along. "I'm actually thinking of sending out a notice downtown, to ask if any of the inns would be willing to take in some students and teachers for the week, at least until the Laird is done."

"So I'm safe?" It seemed much too hopeful; he had expected Rachel to take the bit in her teeth and run.

"No."

And run she did.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks. It's snowing, up here. x.xHope you enjoy your turkey-day with the family. Oh, and I would suggest bringing survival gear and GPS tracking devices along with you if you're going X-mas shopping tomorrow. ;;