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[code]Grand Ridge Academy - Conference Room.[/code]
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The look Penny gave Andrea as she chided her was particularly withering, and she scoffed when the girl insinuated that she didn’t know her. If Andrea was the kind of person who would seek friendship from Britney Williams, then Penny knew the kind of person that she was. Just another sweet, caring, and completely full of shit, backbiting bitch. [i]Be civil like an adult? Seriously? Has she met the adults around here?[/i] Andrea was lucky they weren’t shooting at each other with guns right about now. 

Of course, Britney stepped in and tried to play it off as if she was sorry. Typical move. There were too many people around for her to show her true colors, so she had to pretend to be pleasant. Penny hated people like that. Even when Claire burst in, as she was apt to do, the windbag, Penny did not take her burning, judgmental eyes off of Britney. 

“Right, Claire. You [i]aren’t[/i] helping,” echoed Penny when Britney called her out. She was about to step in and point out that it seemed like Britney knew more than she should’ve when a few of the others in her group did the job for her. Penny held her tongue, her face as smug as a snake. She couldn’t wait to see Britney try to worm her way out of this one. Yet, much to her surprise, Britney pulled out a diary and passed it around the group. 

Awakened. Abstractions. Rita didn’t know what to think. She was never the kind of person to believe in superstitions or to check on her horoscopes, but she had that dream, she had seen a monster. She sat there in silence after passing on the diary, her finger picking at her cheek as she tried to handle the information. The diary said that abilities reflected the user. Well, she could see why being able to force others to tell the truth would fit her—as she was reading, Rita strongly doubted that what this diary was telling her was real. Hell, she still didn’t fully believe it, and in all honesty, it didn’t matter anyway. This wasn’t her town, it wasn’t her fight, and she didn’t know what the job Reid mentioned was but it sure as hell wasn’t one for which she had put in an application. She had other things to worry about; why was she being made to deal with this?

Billy, already sunken into himself with defeat that he had truly deserved, felt even worse after reading the journal. As someone who loved sci-fi and fantasy, he had hundreds of conversations over the years about how cool it would be for something like this to happen. Of course, he was the hero in these conversations, decked out with awesome powers and surrounded by chicks with tight bodies in even tighter spandex, but the reality of it wasn’t so appealing. For starters, despite the sigil on him as far as he knew he didn’t have any damn Abstraction. Talk about being ripped off. Still, that was fine. If great responsibility came with great power, then no power meant he didn’t have to sweat any of this craziness.

So why was he still so on edge, then?

Penny read the diary in a quiet fury. It would’ve been nice to ignore everything that it said, like it was nice to ignore all of life’s problems, but too much of it checked out. She could only imagine her younger brother, Henry, and how he could’ve possibly been attacked like the boy in their dream. Why had that boy—why had Reid—been saved and made into a Guardian if it meant that he would only fail to save Henry later? She felt hot, angry tears well up in her eyes, but she kept them back. She refused to think like that. Until she saw a body, Henry was alive. Missing, but alive. Yet, if she had known about this earlier...she wouldn’t have believed it. As much as she wanted to scream and curse at Britney, she knew she wouldn’t have believed it if the girl had told her. 

"And what's this all even mean? You want us to become the Guardians of this shithole?" asked Claire. Her words were like a hammer, striking against the glass that was holding what little amount of cool Penny had left. "Sorry, not interested, and I doubt anyone else here is interested."

It shattered. Britney barely finished her sentence when Penny started spitting fire.

“Go screw yourself, Claire. You don’t speak for anyone. Jesus Christ, like, you shouldn’t even speak at all, the sound of your voice makes me want to put a bullet through my goddamn head. Of course you don’t want to take responsibility. Nobody was expecting the town whore to step up from her fucking knees!” Penny was shouting, pointing an accusatory finger at the other girl like a fire-and-brimstone preacher. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t people here who would actually want to protect this shithole of a town, including all of the assholes in it like yourself.”

“I’m serious. We just gonna let dickheads like Scott Reese stroll around and murder people because, ehhhhhh, it would be so hard to try? Screw that. Screw. That. I’ll have you know that he—someone—butchered another one of the girls that was also at the camp. Could’ve been any of us,” said Penny, her focus spreading to the group before she lasered back in on Claire.

“I would ask how many more of your trailer trash friends would have to be put in a coma before you stop screwing about, putting what shit you do into your body, trying to, like, [i]open your mind, man,[/i],” she said, with a spot on impersonation of her brother, “and open your eyes, but that would be pointless. Because you have no friends. Because you suck. Jeez-us. Zoey really dodged a bullet by going into that coma. If I was your friend, I would’ve hated to see how much of a fucking coward you actually are.”