[center][color=green][h3]Imogen Reed[/h3][/color][/center]

A captive audience, Imogen watched from down the beach as Maive and her gale-force poltergeist stood against the monstrous frog. She trembled instead of cheering, and she dared not raise her voice even if it couldn’t be heard above the howling wind lest she attract even a modicum of the terror’s attention, but all the same she fervently wished the other girl the best, and hoped that she would succeed. Whether she knew or liked Maive made no difference; this nightmare was an enemy far greater than petty interpersonal quibbles, and against such a foe, human beings stood together. Well, at least in spirit, if not in the flesh. The knowledge of Imogen’s own powerlessness gnawed her with shame and despair, but those feelings hadn’t quite quenched something else that smoldered inside her. Deep within she still burned with anger, but that pilot light still sputtered in the dark, searching for more fuel. It wasn’t yet time to ignite.

Some of the others did what they could, however. Orlando hurled rocks to try and give Maive a chance to recovery, and Verity gave…’advice’. A Maive couldn’t live on words alone, though, and she needed more time than the Orlando’s courageous distraction could provide. But help did, coe, and came from an unexpected source: after a very long internal dialog, and no small amount of head-splitting agony, Daniel made his entrance. In the wake of the windstorm that rolled across the tropical island came a sudden, terrible chill. As its frigid fingers brushed across her skin Imogen tensed up with a gasp, hunkering down as she wrapped her arms around her shoulders in a protective self-embrace. Her gaze snapped to the figure that emerged from the foliage, wreathed in pearlescent fog. “H-huh!?” Behind him he cast a long shadow, deep and black as the bowels of the earth itself, and from the fated union of cold and dark rose a terrifying specter, hooded and shrouded in archetypal black robes. Imogen gawked, shivering in the sand. That tornado-mummy had been one thing, but this? It could only be Death.

[color=0099ff]"Kharon!"[/color] Danny shouted.

[i]...Oh.[/i] Imogen blinked. The boatman from Greek myth, right? [i]Not Death. Gotcha.[/i]

But like the apparition that preceded it, Kharon. seemed less interested in finishing the haggard students off, and more interested in the frog. In what seemed like a matter of seconds, the fearsome Persona smacked the frog in the face with his Boatman Blast, and things went poorly for it. The bug-eyed beast freaked out, its already-reprehensible face melting away as if doused in acid. In its death throes it hurled its captive (who Imogen could now identify as Sofia, restoring her belief in justice) into the air for a wild aerial rave. It reminded Imogen of old Sauce Engine physics. Unfortunately for Sofia, but fortunately for the world at large, her majestic flight soon turned into a headlong plummet into the eldritch ocean. [i]Sploosh.[/i]

Diverting her attention from the toad’s gruesome demise, Imogen watched the spot where Sofia disappeared. No sign of her could be seen either attempting to breach or struggling beneath the surface. “That sucks,” Imogen muttered. Despite her righteous vitriol toward Sofia, she didn’t actually want the other girl to die. But Imogen wasn’t about to risk a dip in that weird water. She glanced back toward the action to find that everything seemed to be over. The frog was gone, the wind subsided, and the cold relented, so Imogen walked over. She could see no sign of either of the mysterious beings that appeared to help the students in their hour of need. Maive passed out, and Daniel looked like death, but even if they seemed fine Imogen felt no need to pester them with useless questions. In a make-believe world like this, things didn’t need to make sense.

That said, Imogen did have one question. She’d be lying if she said she didn’t care about their well-being. With Maive unresponsive, she furrowed her brows toward Daniel, a worried frown on her face. “Are you okay?” she asked. Their future might be uncertain, if any future awaited them beyond this purgatorial place, but at the very least she could focus on the present.