[color=gray][INDENT][INDENT][i]Trace couldn’t get any sleep. Their fingers felt prickly underneath their skin. They balled them up to try to get rid of the feeling only for their grip to feel loose and quivering. Speaking with Katja had settled them a bit, but the barbs of conversation, feelings, and experience still stung. They would for a while. Like those animals that secreted anticoagulants into your bloodstream to make you bleed more. It did little to affect humans considering their size, but the blood was more pronounced, and the festering was more prominent. 

They’d managed to sink a little below the surface of sleep, but far before the dreams could take hold. A gunshot awoke them. They paused, their breath catching in their lungs. Had they heard that correctly? Or was it the beginning of a dream? They laid still for a while, trying to see if another one would peel off.  It did. That’s when they shot up, pulling the blanket off their body. What were they going to do? They weren’t bulletproof. Still, Trace couldn’t back down, it wasn’t within their nature. Their fight or flight always screamed [i]FIGHT[/i]. The world had treated them like shit enough. 

The top of the ten peeled off like a tin can. [COLOR=#D90037]“Fuck!”[/color] Trace yelled out. Yet, before they could gather their wits, all of it was pulled out from underneath them. Rain fell on their head, wet and warm like blood. Hadn’t Bill made a shield before all of this? The crackling of the storm around them painted several figures. One was missing an arm, and the others were in distress if not dead. Stupid thoughts flew into their head. They needed to tell Calliope thanks. They needed to apologize to Banjo. They needed to tell Ted that his kebabs were alright. They needed to hug Haleigh and Luce, and tell Rory that he was actually smart.  So, they ran towards the commotion.

It was an idiot move, actually. As they became fenced in by a hooded figure that seemed to have multiplied themselves to form a barrier of sorts. That didn’t make sense. Who would be attacking them but humans? Normal-ass humans that hated them for being different? Trace pulled away from the figures, their brain a discordant firing off of thoughts.  That’s when the figure focused on them, and they realized who it was—Hyperion.

[i]Beautiful.[/i] That word snapped all those thoughts quiet. It sliced their adrenaline in half. Their fingers stopped quivering but instead flexed outward. [i]Like a Hindi god[/i] Their mother had been a practicing Hindu. Their family kept her shrine in the quiet corner of the living room, where the morning light shown in to break up the gray of the night. The light always danced off the golden statues and offerings.  Ganesha was the prominent one they worshipped because that is what her mother’s family wanted. But their mother had, on occasion, taken it upon herself to place a red hibiscus down for Kali at night. There was a recording of their mother once explaining Kali to Thomas, [color=white]“Goddess Kali reminds us that good can come out of bad situations. By praying to Her, you can achieve your dreams and aspirations. Where there is sorrow, she brings joy, where there is fear, she dances in courage. She dispels darkness from our lives and exalts the Earth with her transient external elements.”[/color]

[color=#48746E]“Look, we’re not calling our daughter, Kali,”[/color] Thomas had said. [color=#48746E]“We don’t need another force of destruction in this house.”[/color] 

Amid the night and the rain, it felt almost prophetic that the strange man would say that. Trace stared down at their pale hands. Kali was the color of darkness, a pure multitude into which the infinite was born and then dissolved back into. What were they?

That thought disappeared when Banjo’s voice erupted outward. Trace tried to move towards him, but the knot of students was too thick to make much progress through. The idiot was going to get himself hurt—or worse—dead. Then he was in the air. [COLOR=#D90037]“No,”[/color] they half-yelled-half-whispered. Their throat felt like a trickle of lemon juice made its way over the destroyed flesh of their windpipe. Another outburst and they barely had enough time to react before a flash of blood and Cass was—no—Cass was also just hurt. He wasn’t dead. Just like… Banjo would just land safely. They’d be fine. They’d all be fine. 

Trace focused on that as people started volunteering themselves to come with the hooded man. Among them was one of the other hyper-humans that had been called out by the hooded man. There was no time to process that, though, they bolted towards Cass—but he was very much dead.[/i][/indent][/indent][/color]

[COLOR=GRAY][hr][CENTER][img]https://i.imgur.com/4LAnNWx.png[/img][/CENTER][indent][sub][COLOR=#D90037][B]Location:[/B][/COLOR] [I]Northern Cove - Dundas Islands, Pacific Ocean[/I][/sub][sup][right][COLOR=#D90037][b]First Class #2.06:[/b][/COLOR] [I]*EXTERNAL SCREAMING*[/I][/right][/sup][/indent][sub][hr][/sub][INDENT][sub][color=#D90037][B]Interaction(s):[/B][/COLOR] [I]Haleigh [@Kuro][/I][/sub][SUP][RIGHT][COLOR=#D90037][b]Previously:[/b][/COLOR] [I]*INTERNAL SCREAMING*[/I][/right][/SUP]
[INDENT]Trace never really cried. It wasn’t that they were emotionally broken or anything, but they did a good job of compartmentalizing their feelings. Putting them into tight little boxes and putting those boxes on shelves. They’d open the boxes on occasion when they wanted to make sure there was still emotion there, but they didn’t wallow in it. They’d just close it back up and put it on the shelf. They made one box, then another, and another, but they couldn’t put all their feelings away about that night. They were all just too complicated.

So, they left one box open, and they poured it out at the funeral. The funeral they thought would have been Banjo’s, but he wasn’t dead. Though, he was dancing close to it. It was a funeral for Cass. Someone that Trace had agreed with more than once but had written off when he’d turned Katja down. They’d fully planned to go off on him for making her feel “less than.” They’d even sorted out the speech and everything. What had it said? They didn’t remember. [i]Something something fuckboy[/i], probably. They hadn’t said anything at the funeral. It was—impossible—to put in enough words that felt like they’d done any justice to Cass’s memory. His family was there, and Trace was just a background character in his story. A background character that still cried.

They slid their hand over their cheek to catch the tears, half expecting to rub the errant, clear liquid on their jacket. But their tears were black. Like a less-viscous ink that pooled in their hand and wormed its way into the wrinkles of their palm. Their blood was a corpse-blue and their tears were an ichor-black. It was sad. They’d bled before they’d cried.  What else about them was alien? 

Trace pulled the jacket tighter to their body. Amidst all the sadness, they couldn’t help but feel the chill of what had been said to them that night. One week had come and gone, and they still lay awake at night thinking about it. A part of them wondered if they, too, had volunteered to join Hyperion and “ascended,” what would have happened? Where would they be? How would they feel? Would it still all hurt? They’d been offered reverence. And they didn’t run towards it. They ran towards people they’d known, who had shared a story and meal with them. Maybe that meant they were good people. Maybe that meant they would always run towards what was comfortable instead of what was new. This stupid school, its stupid classes, its stupid houses, and its stupid hierarchal system all felt frivolous compared to what had happened.

It was then that they became aware of the red hibiscus in their coat pocket. They’d intended to put it on Cass’s corpse as an offering, but they kept it to themselves. As they walked back to the house after the funeral, their stark white hair tried to whip around their head but had been braided back with thick black silk. They'd painted their lips in black and given their eyelids and cheeks some pink. They held the flower in their hand. They rolled the thick, round stem between their two fingers. The once-crushed petals seemingly come back to life. 

They hadn’t really been paying attention but noticed that Haleigh had come up beside them. Trace turned to her as she vowed vengeance. Their lips were a thin line. For once, they didn’t spurt out vitriol or cruelty. They were just closed. Honestly, they didn’t think that Haleigh chose them on purpose. Surely anyone with the Blackjack armband would feel that way. 

Vengeance felt petty. It felt small compared to what they needed to do. Violence only begot more violence until the whole world was on fire. There was something deeper than the need for retaliation. It was understanding. Trace finally understood what hadn’t felt right about this situation. That there’d been a strong push that everything here was monochromatically normal. It wasn’t. Everyone had secrets, and no one was being transparent. Why were they all so bloody, fucking angry at each other? And why were the students here forced to be dragged into their petty little squabbles? Sure, Hyperion wanted hyper-human supremacy, and PRCU just wanted a safe place to train hyper-humans. On that fundamental level, they were not the same, but it seemed more personal—too personal.

[COLOR=#D90037]“Innit what Hyperion would want? Get angry? So, he can spout more stupidity about bein’ superior while we flop around like fish? Nah, I’m good. I ain’ bathin’ in blood for Cass. You can, though. You got the power to.”[/color] They held the hibiscus out to Haleigh. [COLOR=#D90037]“Aren’t you more interested to find out why us? Why Tad? How did they know we were goin’ to be out in the middle of nowhere? This place has its secrets, too, and I’m not happy playin’ that they’re innocent in this, either.”[/color]  [/INDENT][/INDENT][hr][/COLOR]