The beginning

[lowreaches]

Who: The cast

Where: The Belfry's front yard and parking lot

When: Morning

What: A bus has arrived, empty, causing quite the stir.

The storm fell over the town like a pall, and with it came the fog.  

 

It was a hungry, curious thing.  So thick and wet it licked at your clothes and skin when you stepped out into it, tasting you, and stealing sight and color from the world, leaving it slick and oily.  Shadows festered in its recesses, coiling and dancing beneath it like living things, greedy in the low light.  Above was no better:  the angry thunderheads hung mountainous over the city, spitting rain and blooming with lightning.  Storms were fierce in Sinjoh, and this was no exception, booming and growling its discontent, threatening to shake the bones from bodies.  The rain fell in heavy sheets, gutters and creeks swollen and fast with it.  Little rivers streamed across Blackbell.  It choked the city.  It blinded it.  

 

Maybe that's why no one noticed until it was too late.  

 

Out of that grey, pitiless gloom rose the old (new) crooked Belfry, and beneath it, a mass of children and their beleaguered teachers, their rain slickers and jackets shiny in the rain, whispering and sharing glances among themselves -- those who weren't transfixed on the cloudbursts of red and blues in the fog and the occasional ghostlight that meandered clumsily through it.  Police sirens chirped, sharp against the dull grey fog, and sometimes a walkie would crackle to life.  

 

Worse still were the keen wails as whoever stumbled out of their car up to the police barricade were turned aside, told the news, and lost themselves.

 

Because everyone remembered the cargo ship.

 

Everyone remembered what washed up to shore, only a short few weeks ago.  There were pictures all over the internet:  strange, pale figures.  Motionless.  Their mouths toothless gapes.  Their eyes worse.  Empty.  Nothing staring at nothing.  They were human shaped, but too slack, too soggy, too translucent.  They would burst if they tried to move.  Some had when the authorities had gone to collect them.

 

The bus was submerged in the fog, its bright yellow coloring strange and forbidding now.  Nearly twenty minutes ago it had lurched into the parking lot, and died.  It went still, lights and engines snapping off, and no one had noticed anything amiss -- the steady beat of the rain and growl of thunder drowned out everything else the fog didn't cover -- until a few minutes had gone past and no one had stepped off.  The door had remained shut.  Eventually someone investigated.  Called out and knocked on the side door, frowned into the empty inside.  They managed the door open, and a gentle rush of fetid, dark water spilled out.  Inside, the rows and rows of bus seats were empty.  Just backpacks and toys, even a few pokeballs, sat lonely and abandoned.

 

When the authorities arrived, they found the teachers trying to shoo the children away from the bus, many of them lifting on to tiptoe to try and get a glance inside at the back door, or smashing their faces into the side door.  The first cop car was soon joined by another, and another.  EMTs were called:  a child had fainted.  A barricade was constructed, and some order was restored.

 

Until the first parent arrived.  

 

And then the press.

 

The Belfry hunched over the small circus forming on its parking lot, bell toning with the start of the school day.  Its crooked arches and spindly lengths, occasionally thrown into fierce shadows from a lightning strike, were skeletal in the gloom.  School had been cancelled for the day.   Parents were being called to pick up children.  A line was queuing near the western port of the parking lot.

 

Comments

[gingernaps]

The kids huddled in the rain demonstrated a whole variety of reactions to tragedy. Cookie was hardly the only one staring silent into the fog, listening to the rain on her umbrella, nor the only one whose transfixed gaze contained within it a note of curiousity that was destined for the time to go unsatisfied. She really only looked worried when she looked down to her phone, running her thumb through through the droplets on its glassy screen. It took a few anxious swipes through the wet to pick up the call, but her voice was calm when she finally did.

"Hi, mom. I'm alright. No, it's okay. You don't have to. I'm alright. I promise I'm alright."

She spotted Emme too late to evade either greetings or questions, but nodded and gestured to the phone in her hand. With her classmate so close, she mumbled into the receiver.

"It's okay. I'll call back soon. Love you."

The phone went silent and vanished into one of the expansive pockets of Cookie's hoodie. In it's place came a beat-up pack of gum, which she proffered after taking one for herself and chewing thoughtfully.

"Yeah... but this is better than sitting and waiting to hear what's going on," she concluded. Then she looked Emme up and down with a small frown. Her umbrella was too small for two.

"Don't you have an umbrella?"

[phasephoros]

The whole situation made her feel a bit sick to her stomach, otherwise she'd happily take the stick of gum. As such, she refuses with a little shake of her head, reasoning that she wouldn't be able to chew and talk at the same time, it's not because she's that scared or anything. The head shake triggers a shiver that ran down her spine, which she hides by stretching her arms over her head and out to the sides as if the arc could stand in for an umbrella. It can't. The rain still falls through.

"It's too late now for me to get out an umbrella, so there's no point," she says, shrugging water off her shoulders. "I'll just wring everything out before my parents get here. You aren't going home with your mom?" she asks, because of course she was listening in, even through her barrage of questions before. "How're you getting back?"

[gingernaps]

It wasn't appropriate to laugh at a time like this. At the same time, it was hard not to, watching her soaked classmate hold her arms above her head to try to block out the rain, and keep enough cheer in her voice to block out the worry. Cookie did an admirable job holding back a giggle, but did stare at Emme longer than was strictly polite.

"I dunno about that," she answered. "Why didn't you get it out to begin with?"

The humour evaporated from the situation with Emme's follow-up questions, which took her by surprise. Cookie was often a little slow to answer, but seldom due to surprise. She frowned up into the spokes of her umbrella.

"Didn't want to bother her. No point in her skipping work. Figured I'd get a ride with somebody else. Or just get the cops to take me home."

Her gaze returned to Emme, and with it, a smile - the kind she'd probably be flashing to the cops later if she really was set on a ride.

"They're gonna wanna look after we that're left, right?"

[roarin]

"Mom'll take us home."

Raury was a small, weedy thing. His hair was plastered to his head -- he'd been seen earlier staring up at the sky with his mouth agape, swaying softly with his paper white hands stuffed deep in his pockets, like to drown dumb in the rain. His eyes were bright with the storm. The morning had unfolded somber around them, thunder reaching down into their bones, the trees alive with the wind and rain. Raury too. The cold sheets of rain hadnt seeped into him. Just the lightning.

He'd been one of the first ones to crowd at the side door, elbows and high pitched growls making room, and he'd stuck there, front row and center. It wasn't until a tall policewoman had sidled up behind him and set a hand to her hip and shot something low at him that he'd pulled away from it. Then he slunk off, shoulders slung low, hands crowded deeper in his pockets, aw-shucksing to a safe distance away from the pink-haired policewoman and her electric glare and the ghastly yellow bus and its dark, dark windows.

And now he was here. Crowded against Cookie under her umbrella, leaking water and eyes icy in the gloom. They wandered. From the pale blonde girl he was hunched against, to the taller one across from her. He cocked his head and arched an eyebrow, mouth gone sharp and sly at the edges.

"You look stupid. What, you didn't notice the storm 'til now?"

His voice was the whine of steel on stone. He scoffed.

He also dripped wet. His shirt was soaked through and translucent. He sniffled and lifted an arm to scrub his nose red in the crook of it.

"So dumb, you're gonna get sick."