Welcome to Gaia! ::

Scott had been left speechless after their training session. Not for lack of trying, though. He had attempted several times to articulate his anger. The thought that he had twice been unwittingly subjected to Deus Ex Machina’s fabricated reality filled him with such a hot rush of unbridled rage that it left him feeling dizzy. Foul, vile words piled atop one another to try and define what he was feeling, but not a single one possessed the proper magnitude. He had spent the proceeding hours lying in his twin sized bed, fuming, staring up at the expanse of his room’s plaster ceiling in the hope that it would eventually swallow him up.

Scott only left his dorm when his emotions finally simmered, having calmed himself down enough to return to his usual state of cool apathy. His eyes were strained from gazing into all that whiteness, and he slouched through the institution’s halls in a slight daze. His muscles were stiff, his clothes ragged, his head pounding. He felt weary, but he knew sleep wasn’t going to come to him anytime soon. There was too much information to digest, too many things to process without the clout of anger obscuring his view.

He hadn’t been looking for her, but the sight of Hanna sitting by herself filled Scott with a strange sense of relief. He had caught her in the corner of his eye through a window, and briefly debated walking right on by. She was eating and reading, two things Scott usually associated with wanting to be alone. But he found himself pausing, staring, weighing the decision to go outside and join her.

It was a full five minutes before Scott was walking across the grass, the cool night air a distinct contrast to the damp, humid confines of a leather bodysuit. “Find anything useful?” he asked, stopping a foot away from her. “I haven’t opened mine yet. I assume spiders are going to crawl out of the pages if I do.” As always, his tone teetered between sarcasm and sincerity.

Before Scott and Scarlett made their presence known, Hanna had assumed it was them. For whatever reason, the trio had latched together from that very first room -- not counting Hermione and Cho's interactions on the island -- and they all seemed to have a similar attitude to the other hunters. Namely, they all saw them as children.

Hanna glanced up from her book and took another bite of sandwich. "It's all information. I assume it's more groundwork than anything." She marked the page and then clapped the book shut. "I have a feeling that my training will have much more to do with spiders crawling out of every orifice than a nice, informative book." The book landed lightly in the grass, and Hanna stretched her legs out in front of her, rubbing at her knee.

"I wonder if every training session will involve convincing me I am about to die," she said blithely.

If Scarlett hadn't been so frazzled from the fast-paced attempts at making her want to hide in her room for the rest of her life, she might have smirked at the unintentional jump she caused in Scott. She couldn't even find the humor in his frayed nerves though, maybe because she knew she was on the same level of paranoia by now.

"I think the point is to make us feel as if it's as real as possible, though, so we know what happens when we go into a situation with fear." She let the book she had been carrying fall open on the grass in front of her, then leafed through a few pages to try and find the exact reference she wanted. There was no luck though, and she just closed it and pushed it to the side with a small purse of her lips.

"I can't find where I read it, but what I've gotten out of all of this mumbo jumbo is that we're vulnerable to them if we're afraid." She leaned back on the grass and let her arms support her. Her fingers dug into the grass beneath them, curling around the stalks as if to remind herself that they were actually real and this whole world wasn't some terrifying nightmare. The lines of reality blurred a little after too many mind games.