Zeke stared mournfully at the corridor floor. He was inconvenient; people kept bending their paths around him, giving him looks that ranged from uncertain to irritated. But such gifts went unnoticed, he was occupied, the floor had priority. A younger girl actually stopped to look at him, her gaze flickering back between the floor and his face, asking him something he didn't really hear. But she moved on, glancing back over her shoulder.

[color=fdc68a][i]Could this be the work of an enemy's Tablet...?[/i][/color] A frown curved his lips, a precise gesture. His facial expressions were like masks exchanged according to context, iconic, defined, immobile. Only his blue eyes moved as he took in the scene, considered, discarded. [color=fdc68a][i]No. Such a power...could not be permitted to exist in society. Therefore, the answer is...[/i][/color]

Voices wandered through the open door a dozen paces away, some familiar, fewer than that welcome. He shifted to Frown #2, which was deeper and had especially stern accenting, suggesting not just his displeasure but the existence of its gravely erroneous source somewhere in the world. A frown of judgment. Hammer and sword would serve for the awful Monsters that came lurching out of 'nowhere' to prey upon mankind; Zeke's frown was a weapon reserved for a far more dangerous class of entity, one whose pervasive corruption struck even to the heart of his beloved society. Someone was leaving the room, had difficulty with the catastrophe Zeke was observing. He offered absent-minded condolences as they went past him.

[color=fdc68a][i]Ruffians. Riffraff. Class-skippers.[/i][/color]

Technically, Zeke was skipping class as well, as he stood contemplating the horror of what he'd discovered. But only in a very technical sense. He was [i]there[/i], after all, taking notes and listening intently, just like he was hunting down rogue flyers for the Monster Hunting Club with a passion that bordered on fanatic, and wandering around the third floor, looking for trouble, and the first floor, following up on reports of some kind of cyber-organic animal that had gotten loose on the grounds. But those [i]theres[/i] were a little different. A feed from the Enlil Network let him check in on those other selves, his shards, but he wasn't experiencing what they experienced. Mostly they had to relay that stuff back to him, which they were good at, so mostly


[hider=Recollections Like Breaking Glass]Last summer, the night of the storm. Lightning crawling the sky like a spider of light. Seven hours since it had happened.
Zeke was in his room, in bed. He'd been drifting off, but he was completely awake now, his nerves all set to jangling.
The were-light of the storm was all there was. His room was a soft mess of shadows, everything reduced to suggestion, except the shard standing still in the room, head down, wet from the rain. It was dripping all over his carpet.

Not just water. 

[color=fdc68a][i]Are those wounds accidental? Has it been fighting?[/i][/color]

Seven hours since it had shut off its active feed and stopped responding to Enlil pings.
Since one of his shards had just...gone missing.

[color=fdc68a][i]Or did it...[/i][/color]

Its horns had overgrown the daemon template, a twisting curtain that flowed down the side of its head, and the way it spoke, its stumbling, distorted sounds, suggested something was wrong with the shape of its mouth now.
Changes he hadn't approved. Some he wasn't aware of.
But it was what it was saying that had all of Zeke's attention, as the lightning flashed, light and darkness warring for its silhouette.

[color=e8c68a][i]"You're not God to me, you know."[/i][/color][/hider]
it worked out.

People were leaving the room in a clamor. Too many people. Zeke tore his gaze away, finally, from his personal abyss: a trail of stinking drain water splashed carelessly right up to the door of the Club. His heart sank as he saw the company Aito was keeping. [i][color=fdc68a]Ruffians. Delinquents. Chaos...oh, Aito, couldn't you have picked a less harmful addiction? Hard drugs, loose women - well, looser, gambling with Club funds...

...anything but the adoption of these lost and suspiciously-discolored sheep. 'My fleece is white as snow' takes nurture as much as nature, you know.[/color][/i] The taller boy sighed, and fluffed his immaculately-feathered hair, moving on to Frown #3 - one that blamed not only its subject but the shirkless world that had conspired to aid and enable wrongdoing - as he saw where Aito was headed. [i][color=fdc68a]Oh, come on![/color][/i] Technically he could ignore it. There were application stacks to review, interviews to arrange, duties to perform - the opportunity for elegance. Where his friend was going, only gracelessness and disorder could be found, he could report to Cannon, bring things back into their proper alignments, but -

- but Aito [i]was[/i] his friend. Sigh deepening into a groan, Zeke followed - almost making George's mistake as he skidded on a patch of water he hadn't yet added to his portrait of fell misdeeds. It got on his shoes, which were expensive, neat, and perfectly-fit. He hadn't yet developed a frown number high enough to encapsulate the experience; his face simply went blank at the sensation. The shard on the third floor, meanwhile, picked up his warning ping and made its way to the stairwell just in time to meet Vatalla with a close equivalent, Frown #7 - less a progression than a sideline into sorrow - a face that had 'for what blackened acts am I now made to suffer in this particularly terrible way?' written all over it.

[color=fdc68a]"Well and welcome, hopeful Hunters! I see you're experiencing firsthand the courageous initiative and mastery of the present moment for which our Club has earned prominence - alongside our success rate, of course, and our delightfully low yearly fatalities - and eager to join us,"[/color] he said through gritted teeth, raising his voice to be heard across the short distance and walking faster than was entirely dignified, [color=fdc68a]"in this eminently approved and above-board field expedition Aito will of course assume full responsibility for [i]having launched[/i]."[/color]

There would have been addendum, the increasingly-tortured use of formal language he knew was nails on a chalkboard to his closest companion - [color=fdc68a][i]and serves him right![/i][/color] - but the Monster Hunter Secretary caught up to the herd just in time to hear Aito call Vatalla a 'freelance Hunter,' and the awful shock of that silenced him more effectively than would one of the Displacer's world-warping blasts. [color=fdc68a][i]Damnit, Aito![/i][/color]