[COLOR=gray][INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3]B R Y N N  R E Y E S[/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][/COLOR][INDENT][sup]7:55 PM, Night of the Dance | Mather Memorial High School[/sup][/INDENT]


Screams echoed through the gymnasium, punctuated with fierce snarls and growls as students fled left and right. The noises made a hauntingly surreal accompaniment to the slow The Weeknd song playing as Brynn’s eyes tried to make out the disturbance. School dances didn’t come with much screaming, save some crazy partiers that yelled for no reason all the time, and the screams that echoed through the gym spoke more of terror than delirium. The crowds parted in jerk movements to reveal a few hulking figures. With both the wrong and right proportions for students in costumes, they seemed both large and hairy, with odd-shaped beaks on their faces. 


[i]Had someone started a fight?[/i] Brynn wondered, mind skipping around as the figures moved through the crowd. Those nearest to the costumed individuals shied away with screams and yells of surprise, and Brynn realized something was horribly wrong. One of the flashing lights caught the costumed figure, revealing not a man but a morphed humanoid that Brynn could call nothing else but a humanoid wolf—a werewolf.


“Oh my god, are those?” Adrielle said from Brynn’s left, eyes wide in alarm. Brynn was mute next to her friend, hair standing on end when she realized that one of the creatures was [i]looking straight at her[/i]. 


Staring eye-to-eye with the werewolf, Brynn was momentarily transfixed by how eerie the wolf features looked on a human build, how strange the long snout and dilated eyes looked on a oddly hair face matched with sharp, elogated canines that seemed to be too long to fit within the werewolf’s mouth. Only when the werewolf broke its gaze and charged over did Brynn snap out of her daze, pulling Adrielle out of the way with her toward the other side of the gymnasium and into a more sheltered corner.


“Oh my god,” Adrielle repeated, teeth clenched together in a vain effort to stay calm. “Oh my god oh my god oh my god—”


[color=gray]“Adrie, I need you to calm down right now,”[/color] Brynn told her friend sternly, one eye on the werewolves a distance away from them now and the other on her hyperventilating friend. Adrielle’s continued whispers of “oh my god” told Brynn that her friend was in no shape to deal with the werewolves, meaning that there was no chance that Adrielle would be any help with heroics. Brynn was fine with that, but now she had a hyperventilating individual on her hands that she was rather attached to. 


Looking around the gymnasium, Brynn spotted a familiar-looking girl—Belle—slipping out of the double doors on the side of the room and into the hallway. Her eyes skipped over the pandemonium in the center of the gymnasium and towards the set of back doors that were closest to her, and Brynn’s resolve hardened.


[color=gray]“Adrie, we’re going to get out of here,”[/color] Brynn said, looking to her friend. The trembling girl beside Brynn looked at her with wide eyes, mute in fear. 


A shrill scream from the other side of the gymnasium caused both girls to flinch, and Brynn grabbed her friend and made a dash along the far wall for the back doors. The chaos was still mostly gathered by the main entrance into the gym, and it was due to this fact that Brynn managed to get both Adrielle and herself halfway toward the exit. However, their synched movement across the back of the gymnasium did not go entirely unnoticed as a werewolf broke away to chase after the moving targets with a high-pitched howl to mark the start of its hunt. 


Crashing into the wall, the wolf rebounded and came to a snarling stop in front of Brynn, growling as it changed course. The sudden appearance of the werewolf caused Brynn to freeze up again, pure fear filling her mind. There was a distinct feeling of an overflow a piercing thought of being torn to shreds filled her mind—the feeling of some pool of intangible substance spilled over, splashing out and onto the werewolf in front of her. Both Brynn and the werewolf snapped out of their momentary daze, rearing back. Brynn carenteened backwards into Adrielle, causing both girls to crash to the floor, while the wolf fell back in a sprawl of limbs before quickly clambering up and fleeing with its tail between its legs.


Brynn’s heart thudded painfully loud inside her head, blood rushing adrenaline through her system. She shot up to her feet, eyes flicking around the room to scout out the danger, but rather than seeing a group of werewolves tearing into students she saw students rebuffing said wolves with all sorts of mechanisms—fire, ice, bare hands. Brynn’s adrenaline-fueled mind took longer than usual to conjure up coherent thoughts about who the element-wielding students were, and it took her a few seconds to place them and realize that most of them—no, all of them—were in her Social Conscience class. In fact, none other than Mr. Lehrer was in the element-wielding students’ midsts, arms adorned with glowing symbols that swirled fanciful designs on flesh in the middle of the battlefield.


That her teacher and classmates were using superpowers—elements and glowing tattoos and bare, bloody hands—provided Brynn amazing clarity into the class’ circumstances. Suddenly it struck Brynn that her encounter with the werewolf earlier—the way the beast had fled, its tail an indication of its terror that so resembled Brynn’s own after seeing herself get torn into shreds—was out of the ordinary as well. In fact she’d seen this sort of thing before—when her brother managed to magick himself from the bathroom into the closet during a round hide-and-seek back when Brynn was in grade school. This sort of miraculous mystery that was inexplicable at its core unless someone gave up on trying to explain it and just accepted the illustrated worlds of Marvel or DC and went with the flow.


And just as quickly as the clarity came, it was gone.




[COLOR=gray][INDENT][B][SUP][SUB][H3]B R Y N N  R E Y E S[/H3][/SUB][/SUP][/B][/INDENT][hr][/COLOR][INDENT][sup]12:00 PM, Day after the dance | Downtown Crestwood[/sup][/INDENT]


“Damn. Still can’t believe someone decided to start a fire at the school dance,” Adrielle said, frowning as she took another sip of her frappacino. Brynn nodded in agreement, idly tracing shapes on the misty exterior of her own frappe. “Seriously, what were they thinking? When will people get it into their heads that burning stuff up [i]isn’t cool[/i]?”


[color=gray]“At least we got out okay,”[/color] Brynn said, sighing and smoothing over the shape in the condensation with a thumb, obliterating it from the plastic surface before she took a sip of her frappe. Pumpkin spice, just because she felt obligated to try it on the first day it came out. She grimaced, successfully reminded of why she hated the flavor. [color=gray]“We’re lucky no one got hurt.”[/color]


“No one you know of,” Adrielle corrected. Brynn pulled a face, and Adrielle hurriedly made amends. “Of course, that probably means no one. I mean of course they’d tell the student council if anything bad happened—you all organized the event! There’s no way they’d keep you out of the loop entirely.”


[color=gray]“Thanks Adrie,”[/color] Brynn said, a wry smile on her face as she went back to staring at the mist-less plastic exterior of her drink. Honestly Brynn didn’t feel much about the dance. What was there to feel? It wasn’t the council’s fault that some idiot had thought it a good idea to torch the place.


Still, Brynn couldn’t help a twinge of disappointment at the ominously bad start for the council this year. She had thought she’d had enough on her plate with just schoolwork and council meetings, and she wasn’t looking forward to starting volleyball season while participating in some sort of police-involved investigation along—assuming that it came to that, of course.


Brynn counted herself as a person that minded her own business for the most part, nodding along to whatever gossip that was passed onto her. But, if asked by an authority figure such as an officer, she would naturally answer with the truth. No use in not saving your own skin when it came down to it, especially not when it’s about strangers and whatnot. This, however, only counted when it really came down to it, and Brynn didn’t see that happening. 


That she might be asked to point fingers at classmates that had yet to prove themselves to be anything other than decent people was depressing enough. The worst part, however, was that Brynn distinctly remembered a certain XXL-size hoodie in conjunction with the arsonist, and that exact hoodie belonged to a boy her last period class that had no shortage of rumours surrounding him or what he’d allegedly done.