"Are you sure you didn't see anything? Anything at all?"
Airi Fujita, known mostly as Clio, considered this question as she stood by the school gates, standing in the exact place that she had been standing that day, the one the detective had asked her about. It was not the first time she had been asked about it, and she hoped it wouldn't be the last. She had no answer for them, and she still wouldn't but she wanted to be asked anyway. She wanted to be asked, because she wanted there to be an answer.
An answer that wasn't just, no, I didn't see anything.
And so, since it was the Emperor's Birthday and therefore a national holiday, rather than having to rush off for any lessons or practises, she stood right where she had stood on the day she kept being asked about, watching the traffic and the people just as she had back then. It had been the first day of the new term that day, and therefore a lot busier than it was now. People had been rushing to school, to work, to other places. There had a bus-load of fourth-graders too, making their way to Hope's Peak for a school trip, their teachers telling them that if they worked hard enough at their passion, they could end up here too, one day. Clio hadn't paid them much heed, as she'd been looking out for one person and then spotting her, both of them waving to each other as that person reached the crossing, and waited for the green man light.
And then a bus had gone by, and the first time the light had gone green, the fourth graders had taken so long to cross that it had gone red again by the time they were done. And then there had been other buses and larger cars that had gone by, and once or twice Clio had been distracted by saying hello to other students she knew, and stepping out of the way of others. But then the traffic had cleared a bit, and the green man light was back on again…
…but Fukue Amari, her best friend, was no longer there.
Fukue had not been the first to disappear, and as it turned out, she wouldn't be the last. But just as she hadn't seen anything the day Fukue had disappeared, nobody else had seen anything when any of the others had disappeared. Multiple acts of sleight-of-hand, where even the magician was concealed from the view of any audience, and managed to remain that way even once the trick was revealed.
A slightly stronger breeze blew, and Clio shivered beneath her pink jumper and fluffy white scarf. She realised she had been standing there waiting longer than she had planned. I should have worn a jacket, she thought tiredly, rubbing her hands together. With a tired reluctance, she turned away from the gate and trudged back into the main school building, heading for the reception area and going into the sign-in screen.
"You know," the school receptionist said. "If you're not actually leaving the school campus properly, you don't need to sign in and out."
"I know." Clio said politely, still signing back in anyway.
She felt the receptionist's eyes on her as she selected her year group and then looked for her name on screen. It didn't take her long to find it, neatly displayed beneath her most recent school photograph, in which she stared right out almost expressionlessly, the scar across her nose seeming starker against her freckles than it actually was in real life, silver hair left down with the stray strands worked into her usual plaited half-crown, the pink neck ribbon tied neater than she usually had it on school days. Apart from the fact she wasn't currently wearing school uniform, Clio imagined that in this moment, she looked exactly the same as she did in that photograph, more or less. She selected the photograph, confirming she had left at the time that last showed up on the screen, before then looking in her daisy-shaped purse for her Electro-ID and scanning it as the final step to signing in. She didn't know if the receptionists knew that she had just gone to stand by the gate, or if they knew just how many times that she had done so. She wasn't sure she wanted to know, and to therefore face their judgement over it. She knew it was a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over while hoping something different would happen but what could she do? She didn't know what she could do. If she could even do anything.
And Fukue wasn't the first person she'd lost to one of these disappearances, either.
Once she was properly signed in, she let out a sigh of relief at the thought that there was now a proper record of her last few movements, and put away her Electro-ID. She then left the main school building and started to walk across the campus, keeping her pace brisk to try and ward off the chill. There were some students milling around here and there, a few staff too. To her surprise, she didn't see any of the extra security staff that had been around before. She hadn't noticed their absence before, and she wondered if they had been newly withdrawn. The thought made her shiver again, and she briefly thought about heading to the dorms instead and getting a jacket. But then she shook her head and continued to where she was originally going to go-The Student Café.
"Yeah yeah yeah, it ain't the most imaginative name, but it'll do for now. I'll figure somethin' out eventually. Or someone else will. I dunno."
Despite Luca Fontana saying this multiple times, he never had changed the name. Most likely, it had slipped his memory, but given the fact he was essentially the manager of the Student Café, she thought that was forgivable. More than forgivable, really. He was the SHSL Barista, he had been managing the café, he had helped to build up the Disabled Students Network, had worked hard at improving both his Japanese and his English. All this, despite the challenges he faced all the time, and the things he'd gone through before even joining Hope's Peak.
Everything about Luca was admirable, and though she hadn't been able to return his romantic feelings when he'd confessed to her last year, that hadn't stopped them being friends. If anything, it had made them better friends, she thought. And he'd become friendly with Fukue in recent months, too, which was even better. Before he'd disappeared, she'd been starting to wonder if perhaps they might become an item instead. Hoping for it, even.
I wonder, can I still hope for that, now they're both gone? I know at least that if they're in the same place, they'll look after each other. The thought was, however, a cold comfort.
Clio stopped outside the café, its chalkboard sign decorated with cheerful, haphazard doodles of hearts and a chibi cupid sitting in a tea-cup making her smile, though that smile faltered as she looked at the other side of the chalkboard sign, which had 'THE STUDENT CAFÉ' in hot-pink, purple and white bubble letters and 'founded by Luca Fontana, SHSL Barista' beneath it. As if she needed reminding. She had no complaints about it though, because Valentine's Day was her favourite for the aesthetic. She didn't have a girlfriend yet, otherwise she'd appreciate the actual romance too, but that was something that'd come in time. There was no rush.
Noticing that part of the chain of shimmery hearts that were being used to decorate the canopies had come loose and were flapping in the breeze, she decided to readjust them. Since nobody was sitting in the outdoor area, first she fixed the parts she could reach, and then she carefully climbed onto the nearest of the unoccupied benches and tried to adjust the higher parts. Of course, she couldn't reach it all, so after that she hopped back down, and went to look at the noticeboard stuck to the wall.
It was so crammed with flyers one could barely see the original board itself. People had even stuck things up on the frame of the noticeboard itself, but smaller things-sticky notes with insults or confessions of love, other little notes that simply said hello, or have a nice day, or had silly doodles. But dotted in-between these were small photographs of students, but not just any students, of course.
These photographs were smaller versions of the photographs that adorned the posters that were on the board itself. Some, like Fukue's, were their most recent school portraits. Fukue's made her look pensive yet resolute, light brown eyes big behind her glasses, hair left undone and unadorned, something that always got remarked upon as unusual for an SHSL Hairstylist. Others, like Luca's, were more personal photographs, provided by family or friends. Luca's had been taken days before his disappearance, while he had still been in Italy enjoying Christmas with his family. Indeed, she knew in the full version of that photograph, he had been surrounded by his many adoptive siblings. His grey hair was as messy as always, and he still looked tired, but he had new silver hoops in his ears and he was smiling.
But whether a school portrait, or a family shot, or a candid photograph, or even something from promotional material, all of those photographs had one thing in common. No matter the expression on their subjects' faces, they were all photographs that screamed: MISSING, that asked: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PERSON?, that begged: PLEASE HELP. These posters with their photographs were everywhere, but so call, none of the pleas or the questions they presented had been answered. And now the posters were faded, their corners scuffed, and some of them overlapped by new posters. Her eyes were drawn to one in particular, simple plain text that announced:
CONSULTATION ON HOPE'S PEAK EXPANSION: HAVE YOUR SAY!
So, they're starting to talk about that again, huh? Clio hadn't heard anything since just after Luca's disappearance, and she had assumed that Hope's Peak had decided to table such discussions until the students were found. Clearly, they had not. She didn't know quite what to feel about that, and so she tore her gaze away from that poster, and the posters with all the missing faces on them, and entered the Student Café.
Inside, it wasn't that busy but neither was it completely quiet. It was the first National Holiday that the public had been allowed into the school for since the disappearances, but there weren't as many members of the public as Clio assumed there would have been. Then again, Hope's Peak hadn't made a big song and dance over relaxing the restriction that in place since after the short winter break, when it became clear that Luca had disappeared. She couldn't even rightly remember when it had been relaxed.
What she did remember was how there had been such an outrage when the restriction had been put into place. She remembered watching the press conference that had aired in the final days of the Winter Break, where Hope's Peak had announced that they would not be holding their much-anticipated public Coming-of-Age celebration this time around. It didn't matter that a student had disappeared the day before the press conference, that Fukue would disappear the day after Coming-of-Age Day, the first day of term. The school trip group had been turned away once the alarm had been raised over Fukue, literally at the last minute, and even they had not been as angry about that as the public had been over the cancellation of the Coming-of-Age things, and the other restrictions that had rapidly followed. Clio knew, of course, it had not been everyone. Like her, many had applauded the serious approach that was being taken. But sometimes, it felt like the unreasonable ones had been louder.
Those restrictions seemed to be no more, though. As always whenever there were members of the public around, there were people who were either photographing or filming the café. One of them seemed to have their phone aimed at the students working behind the counter, but those students seemed to be making a concerted effort at ignoring them, instead focusing on serving the student and the member of the public who were waiting at the counter. Clio approached the counter and quietly waited behind them. She looked at the cupboards behind them, where copies of some of the other missing posters were posted. Not all of them, just those of the missing students who had also worked in this café. Which, of course, included Luca.
When the member of the public had received their order, Clio stepped up to make her own.
"Oh, hey, Fujita-san!" the student behind the counter said. "Coming here for breakfast?"
"Yeah, since the canteen is closed today and all, I thought it would be nice. It makes me feel closer to Luca-kun…and Fukue-chan, actually."
Clio looked over her shoulder. They hadn't had a specific table they'd go to, but whenever they could, she and Fukue always went for a table by the window. And whenever Luca got a moment to stop by and chat, he'd do that. He rarely had time to pull up a chair to properly sit with them, though, but it didn't really matter. All of those moments had been nice ones, ones she'd taken for granted until he had disappeared. She wondered if she still had been taking them for granted when Fukue had disappeared, too. After all, she'd taken it for granted that Fukue would cross the road safely that morning, hadn't she?
"Yeah, I know what you mean," the student said. "It's not really the same without Fontana-sempai here. Hopefully they'll find him and the others soon."
"Psh, not fucking likely."
This came from the other student who was waiting for an order, and when Clio and the student behind the counter stared at them, they rolled their eyes.
"Come on, nobody else has disappeared since the last one, so they're not looking any more!"
"Of course they're still looking," the student behind the counter said. "It's an open case, right?"
"Then why haven't they found anyone?" the other student challenged. "Come on, sixteen students! Some of them are proper celebrities and some of them are foreign, so you've got foreign governments and what not breathing down our necks on top of all the usual attention, right?"
Clio held back from saying that didn't necessarily mean anything. She remembered the whispers when Dax Haley had disappeared. Of course, since he had been the very first, she supposed that it made sense nobody realised that he was part of a pattern. But she remembered hearing the whispers (and, in some cases, the shouts) that because he was foreign, he wasn't worth the time. Sure, he was American, but American was still foreign. There were other things about him that to some, had deemed him not worth the concern, but somehow the foreignness had been what everyone circled back to. Most likely it was because other students who had disappeared were also foreigners of some variety. Not all of them, not by far. But enough to make people not want to care, or to care too much.
It made her wonder what the reaction would have been if she had been one of the ones to go missing. She had a Japanese father, a fully Japanese legal name, was a citizen who had lived in the country all her life. Even her Talent was very Japanese. But she knew there were some people who'd look at her American nickname and her American mother and decide that she was foreign enough to make some sort of a fuss about. However…
"I spoke to a detective the other day again," Clio said. "I had to go through what happened the day Fukue-chan disappeared, to see if I remembered anything new, or different."
"Fujita-san, I didn't know this!" the student behind the counter exclaimed.
"And did you?" the other student asked, eyebrow raised.
Clio pressed her mouth into a thin line and shook her head.
"Alright, so that's the tomato and three cheese flatbread, the 'Great British Fry-Up ' roll, the ham and cheese toastie…and then here's your large flat white, your regular macchiato and regular espresso and one packet of dark chocolate Florentines. Happy eating!"
Another student came out from the kitchen area of the café with the very order that they had announced, this one taking up two take-out bags. The waiting student perked up a little bit at the sight of their order,
"Whatever," they muttered eventually. "I think it's time to give up."
And with that, they left. The student who had just come out of the kitchen raised an eyebrow at the one who had been behind the counter and then asked:
"What was that about?"
"Oh, the usual. Anyway, Fujita-san, what did you want to order?"
Clio made to answer, but then realised she didn't actually know. Both students on the other side of the counter smiled and suggested:
"Why not have your usual? It is a national holiday, after all."
Clio thought about this. She thought that perhaps two small cinnamon swirls and a mini-waffle were reasonable for breakfast, but definitely not with a scoop of vanilla ice-cream and the sauces she typically liked.
"Yeah, but rather than the ice-cream, could I have a pot of yoghurt?" she asked. "And for my drink, I think I need coffee…maybe the toffee nut latte?"
"Do you want the yoghurt with granola? Berries?"
"Just the berries, please. Especially strawberries if you can."
"Coolio, coming right up!"
Clio chose a table close to the counter and waited patiently. Her drink came first, and she sipped that while her food was being prepared, in between other orders-of which there was a steady (if slow) stream. When she received her cinnamon swirls, mini-waffle and yoghurt the student who delivered them to her paused and asked:
"Hey, what do you think about the school dance going ahead?"
"It is?" Clio asked.
"Yeah, it is," the student said. "It's still on the website, but then again it was never taken down, was it? And it's not like they ever explicitly said they were considering stopping it. It's not open to the public or anything anyway, so why would they?"
"Hmmmm."
"But I guess it could be seen as insensitive though, right? Like, what if they're still missing by then?"
Clio drummed her fingers against the side of the bowl her yoghurt was in, and then stirred the yoghurt, watching how it turned her favourite shade of pink because of the berries. After a moment of this, she carefully said:
"It is. But on the other hand…it's optimistic, right?"
She had been looking forward to the end of year dance. She and Fukue were going to choose outfits together. Neither of them were going to buy anything new-they would save that for next year, when they graduated. But this year, like the last, they'd planned to pool their wardrobes and see what they could find. Fukue was going to do her hair, and in return Clio was going to do Fukue's. It was so rare for anyone to offer to do Fukue's hair for her, Clio had been determined to do a good job, something that, though obviously never as good as what an SHSL Hairstylist was capable of, would be something that'd make Fukue look and feel truly special. And they were both going to go with Luca, rather than with a date. Not that any of them had dates they'd want to go with…but Clio had secretly been hoping she'd find a moment to 'accidentally' leave the two of them alone during some of the slow dances.
And again, the question arose: Is it still alright to hope for things like this? Or even to hope at all?
The student shrugged:
"Yeah, well…I guess it could be kind of stress relief-"
They were interrupted by a crash from the kitchen, which sent them racing back in. From this point, Clio ate mostly in silence, apart from when she said hello to few students that she knew as they came in and ordered their food. She was just thinking about what she was going to do with the rest of her day (which, suddenly, felt impossibly long, impossibly deep) when one of the other students working in the café approached her and said:
"Hey, Fujita-san, are you free the rest of the day?"
"Mostly," she said slowly. "I was going to study a little bit, and I want to get a light workout in if I can but apart from that, I'm not sure."
As she said this, Clio thought of the housebound lady who lived nearby whom she sometimes ran errands for. She'd checked on her the other day, though, and she knew that other people came to see the lady, so it was probably fine if she waited until tomorrow. So, she decided not to mention that, and asked:
"How come?"
"Could we ask you to cover a shift here? We're going to be short in the evening, and if I'm remembering correctly, you have done a few shifts here before, right?"
"Mostly last year," she said. "But yes, that's right. What time were you thinking?"
"From about three thirty, until closing time at seven?"
Clio did not have to think too much about that:
"That's fine, I can do that."
"Brilliant, thank you so much! I'll put your name on the shift roster!"
Clio smiled at them as they dashed off, and then she put a reminder in both her phone and her Electro-ID. She finished the last of her breakfast and took up her bowl and cup to the counter. As thanks for her agreeing to do the shift, one of the students insisted on giving her a large take-out cup of her usual berry tea on the house. She accepted gratefully and found herself feeling even more grateful for its warmth when she stepped outside to a chill that was sharper than it had been earlier.
Right, she thought to herself, get yourself back in the warmth. She decided the best way to do that was to go back to her dorm and study for a while, and then go to the school dojo or the gym to get a work-out in before then heading off campus to buy lunch somewhere. Or perhaps she could go to the school kitchens and make something herself? She knew that quite a few students would opt to do that today, and perhaps the camaraderie that cooking together (or at least, in parallel) would foster would do her good.
…either way, when I next leave the building I must take a jacket.
She idled away the time by thinking of the jackets she had hanging in her wardrobe, deciding which one would go the best with her outfit. Not that it mattered, given that she'd be taking it off when she entered another building anyway. That, and most of them were some shade of pink anyway, apart from the one deep grey frock coat that she'd picked up in a sale just before Christmas, but even that had dusty-pink fur on the cuffs and collar, and rose-gold buttons that as far as she was concerned, were also a kind of pink. She'd even persuaded Fukue to buy a similar coat in the sales, except hers had been a lighter grey, with mint-green fur and silver buttons. That coat was hanging in Clio's dorm wardrobe though, next to her own, because Fukue hadn't wanted any of her siblings (or worse, her mother) claiming it for themselves simply because it was new and they wanted it.
Remembering that coat made Clio slow down as she got close to the dorms, but even then she didn't immediately realise something was off. Even when she made herself stop completely, take a larger sip of her tea to collect herself, she didn't realise it. It was only after a few moments, as she let the tea warm her from the inside while her edges still froze, that she started to take everything else in. And she couldn't quite tell what it was that was nagging at her, tugging at her attention, but eventually, she at least realised the feeling was there. It had snuck up upon her, but once it was there, it was blatant.
Nervously, she looked around her. There seemed to be no security guards around here, either, even though they'd had trouble with overzealous members of the public even before Dax Haley's disappearance had kickstarted this whole nightmare. But there didn't seem to be any members of the public, either. No students were nearby, although she could see some a bit further away. She took her phone out of her purse and gripped it in one hand, still holding her cup of tea in the other, before looking at the building again.
What is it?
She scanned the building, sipping some more of her tea as she did so. It was still a solid, red-bricked, two-story building with a flat roof that had high railings on it. The main door was locked, only accessible with an Electro-ID or the emergency passes staff were allowed to make use of in, as the name suggested, emergencies. There was a cheerful wooden sign by the door on one side, a large noticeboard on the other side, this one also laden with missing student posters, a poster about the school-expansion consultation and other notices, but not nearly as packed as the one outside The Student Café. Nothing about it seemed out of place, though. No twitching curtains, or lights flickering behind the windows, or anything that she could immediately place as the reason her hackles were rising. So, she turned her attention back to her surroundings. But there didn't seem to be anything wrong, or suspicious, about the people who were on the grounds, and the buildings that she saw from here didn't seem to have anything wrong with them.
No, that's not it. Closer…
The dorm building had a small garden that wrapped around it, and then continued on at the back of the building. The back bit was fenced off, with a side gate, and it had been a point of contention that there wasn't a fence around the entire dorm building. The entire garden was carefully planted with an arrangement of plants that ensured that there was something growing all year round. At the moment there were snowdrops waving around cheerfully, cyclamen dotted around and a few irises slowly starting to emerge. There were also plenty of evergreens, including a clump of bushes around the side of the building that were a brilliant green-
-wait, what's that?
Clio knew she couldn't just charge forward. But what was she supposed to do? The people she'd usually call to tell them about this were both gone. Looking at her phone, she was seized with a chest-squeezing pain before remembering the year group chat. Members of the student council had suggested they were used to keep tabs on each other, just in case, with varying levels of effectiveness. While she didn't expect any of them to come running to her aid, at least if she said something, they'd know.
Deciding that would be the best thing to do, she raised her phone up, snapped pictures of the bushes and the glimpse of the not-right thing that she thought she had seen, and sent the pictures with a simple caption telling them that she was going to investigate. Then, she locked her phone and, still holding it in her hand, took a few steps forward, and then some more, each one tentative, always looking over her shoulder. Once she was close enough to the bushes, she knelt carefully to try and get a better look at what she saw, pushing away some greenery with her elbow to get a better look. She frowned, her eyes adjusting to the green shadows the bushes cast, but it didn't take long for her to make sense of what she was seeing.
She didn't realise her tea had slipped from her hand until she felt the still-warm liquid splash over all over her, and heard her cup roll away as she scrambled back, still on her knees. She did not scream, but found that even if she wanted to, she couldn't, because when she tried to call out her voice felt strangled. Still, she tried to make a phone call, like she knew she should, but her fingers fumbled, heavy with the shock and sticky with tea. And time seemed to stretch on, forever, with her trapped in it like a fly in amber. So even though she badly wanted to look away, she couldn't. Then again, it wasn't like the dead student lying in the bushes could look away either, could they?
Not with those sightless eyes, anyway.
Characters introduced this chapter (I use 'introduce' fairly loosely in the case of the missing students here but oh well):
-Airi 'Clio' Fujita, SHSL Kudo Practitioner, remaining student, second year (my OC)
-Fukue Amari, SHSL Hairstylist, missing student, second year (my OC)
-Luca Fontana, SHSL Barista, missing student, third year (my OC)
So today is the final day for early acceptances, but I am not being particularly strict about it. As long as it's still the 21st in your timezone then even if it's already the 22nd in mine then I'd count it within the candidates for early acceptance. And truth be told I'm not going to be measuring your timezones precisely anyway, and say if you send half a duo within the early window and the other half afterwards I may still count it as an early acceptance candidate. Maybe. However, even if you don't make it in that window, there is still the final deadline of 3rd March! And although I have read almost all the submissions I've got at the time of posting this(and have acknowledged them all, even if it's to say 'I will get to read this later') I'll only be making my decisions over the next week, maybe, once I've had a re-read of them and thought about it. If you do get in, you'll get a PM specifically to say that your character(s) has been accepted and then I'll update the Talent list and accepted character counts on my profile accordingly.
Anyway, though I'd say I have a decent amount of submissions for this early period, I wouldn't say that it's so many that there are particular types I am getting or needing more of, so I'd say anything goes, still. With that being said, given that remaining student spots are very popular I am thinking of possibly increasing the slots. It would not necessarily be by very much if I did (one or two, likely), and that's something I'd really only decide closer to the end of the final deadline, but it is a possibility. Might even do the same with staff and investigators, though not with missing students since I have already established the number of disappearances as sixteen here. While I am waiting for submissions, I will probably focus more on writing and getting out the next chapter of my other project. However, I will continue looking through whatever submissions I get (which of course includes deciding early acceptances), start what planning I can for the main story, and attempt to put out a special chapter of some sort-probably a chapter detailing a disappearance.
There isn't much more to say at the moment, so I'll leave it at that. I hope you enjoyed this chapter (if you want, leave a review but if not no worries) and that you'll look forward to the next!
