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Avalon had been asleep for some time now. She had gone to bed around 7pm or so after her latest frolic on the school grounds. It had left her exhausted. She was curled snugly underneath her favorite quilt that her mother sewed her. She had had it since childhood. It was print with geometric shapes and primary colors, with flecks of white fabric swatches. Purple pom poms decorated every corner.

Avvie waved a hand at the alarm she heard going off. Her room was still dark, only the orangey glow of fire penetrating through her windows. It took a few minutes before Avalon figured out that the sound wasn't from her alarm clock, but from the school's fire alarm system.

Avalon bolted up in bed and starred out the window in sheer horror. She was on the second floor! There was no way she was making it out of this mess alive! It was up or down from here. Hopefully down. Avalon quickly crawled from her bed and wrapped her quilt tightly around her petite frame.

Avalon head to the door. She ran the back of her hand across her door. It was warm, but not scalding. She opened the door. She head out of her room, wide-eyed. She looked at the other panicked students and then bolted for the stairs to the first floor.

When she reached the stairs she let out a hurt yelp. The fire was licking it's way up from the first floor. Avalon was going to be stuck in this building! She turned heel and headed back in the direction she came, maybe there was a fire escape. Or refuge on floor 3, the roof... she could wait it out there until the firemen came.

"What am I going to do, what to do?" Avalon chanted as she made haste to the floor 3 stairs. She needed a plan. Why didn't she heed her mother's warning about practicing fire safety.

It was then that she heard the explosion. Then that she saw the holes rip open in the flooring. That's when Avalon truly became scared. Making matters worse, her proximity to the debris from the explosion had ignited her quilt.

Avalon recalled a single rule from elementary school. In case your clothing is on fire, STOP DROP ROLL. That is exactly what Avvie took to doing, right there in the middle off the hall, in the midst of the panicked students. She stopped, dropped, and rolled... but sadly, all she ended up doing was tangling herself in the blanket.

Avvie felt the heat stinging her calves and crawling up her legs to her back. She cried out as it singed her flesh. She needed to remove and forget the quilt, even if it was the only thing she took from her room. The fabric had trapped her and the pain immobilized her. It just hurt so bad.

Tears streaked the fourteen-year-old's face. She was much too young to die. She had so many things left undone. She had not experienced all high school had to offer. Her first dance. Her first boyfriend. Their first date. First kisses. Parties. Girl friends. Honor Roll! She had not even received her first report card yet!... She should have called her mother before she had gone to sleep like she had wanted. Avvie would have been able to speak to her kitty, Noir, one last time. But, there were no last "I love you, Mom"s or "I love you most, Noir"s. Only sobs.

Avvie had finally kicked herself free of the burning fabric and pushed herself on her elbows to the wall, where she sat with her face in her hands. Her shins pained her so much, her heart ached for her mother, for Noir, for the events she would miss with her premature death. There was no use making it for the roof. Barren Pines was condemned anyway, with all that Bacterial Meningitis.... course there was talk of murder.... but, if Avvie didn't go out that way, this way was just as acceptable. If not more. At least no single person had set the school ablaze, right?

Avalon kept her back against the wall and wept.
"I love you, Mommy." She cried.
"I love you too, Noir." She let a strong sob wrench from her. Her sweet Noir, she let a hand down to stroke the burning carpet. His soft fur ruffled between her fingers. Avalon could hear him purring.

A beam snapped free from the ceiling and came crashing down beside her. The walls creaked with the added stress. Some of the paint blistered and melted from the drywall. Fragments crumbled. Walls waxed and waned. And Avalon stayed put. Not swayed by the goings on around her.

The smoke had finally fogged her brain. She gave a harsh cough, but continued to stroke the carpet.
"I promise to get you catnip on my next visit home, Noir."

Tears still streamed down her face, but there was a content grin on her face.

Avalon let out a rough cough and then wheezed in a shaky breath. The air was thick with smoke and thin with oxygen. It would be all over soon. Fire was peeking up all around her.

Avvie squinted her eyes, and hacked again. Things were getting so fuzzy and her sense of self was floating away. Hazel orbs landed on the smoldering quilt in front of her... but she did not see quilt. She saw Noir and crawled, painfully, towards him.

She turned her head to the side and let out another harsh cough, sputtering up blackened spit. She spat it to the side and then curled up with her cat. She ruffled her face in the burning quilt. It singed her rose colored hair. But Avalon no longer cared. All she cared was that she was with her beloved Noir. Nothing could take that wonderful emotion from her.

Her surroundings darkened as hazel eyes closed. Her senses dulled. Her breathing more labored. She had already lost feeling, her legs numb with pain. It didn't even hurt to breath anymore. It wasn't even too hot.

Her eyes opened and she looked straight into her beloved cat's eyes.

"I love you most, Noir." She beamed, pushing her head further into her pet's fur.

Avalon's spirit had finally been extinguished. Asphyxiated by the thick smoke that clogged the hallways. Numbed by the third degree burns that covered her lower half. Blinded by the hallucinations of her beloved feline companion. Avalon had gone out with what she loved best, memories and the company of Noir.

The smoke snuck in through the airvent, and Laney Sutton's first thought was that Fallon had burned something, she'd gotten so over-stressed.

They said that you smelled the smoke before you saw it. They did say that.

Laney's door was not hot to the touch. Her doorknob wasn't hot to the touch, either. So when she opened her door, the dark gray smoke rolled in on her, milky black, and she was unprepared. She coughed, and for the first few seconds, she couldn't breathe. She stopped, dropped, rolled. It was what you did -- after a fashion. But staying low, the smoke pooled into her room overhead and she could breathe again. It was good: her breath was coming fast now. Her heart raced, and she thought, absurdly -- do I have any of my old Prozac left? I think I need it.

But she moved forward on her hands and knees, and tried to very calmly look at the situation. It didn't work very well, her mind crammed itself into odd-shaped little corners of invisible mazes, focusing on strange, distracting things: What part of Tara's microscope would melt first? What time was it where her parents were? What grade had Laney gotten on her Brit Lit paper?

She wasn't successful. Laney crawled down the hall with a slow deliberacy that didn't match her thought process.

When she had been a little girl, Laney had had an agonizing fear of winter, of all things. In winter she walked home from school at 4:45 in the cold, early dark, to a dark, noiseless house. There she waited for four hours until her father came home at his usual time, diligently tracing her way through her homework -- but it was difficult. An empty house was full of threats, looming dangers in every creaking floorboard or curtain whispering secrets against the window. She sat on a little barstool in the kitchen, notebooks fanned out across the island, and flinched at every new terror.

It was too dark in winter. It got dark so early.

She had drowned out her fears with singing, Laney's thready little soprano voice coating all the phantom noises around her -- and this had become a habit to comfort herself when she was afraid, a soundtrack to carry with her.

She sang as she went. "When you see the storm is comin', see the lightning part the skies, it's too late to run -- there's terror in your eyes. What you do, then, is remember this old thing you heard me say: it's this storm, not you, that's bound to blow away."

'They didn't clean the lint trap,' she realized belatedly. 'They didn't clean the lint trap, and the dorm caught on fire.'

Against all hope, against a great deal of logic, she clambered her way towards the fire escape where she and Tara had watched the skies on so many nights before. The ladder was locked, she knew -- another second floor issue she'd so carefully documented -- but the stairwells were flooded with smoke and encroaching heat. She could pick the lock on the ladder, or she could jump and hope for the best, or, well -- well. She'd be in a place she felt was like a home to her. She'd be in a good place.

The window was unlatched, and then it was just Laney and the blissful, refreshing clean air of the outside. The smoke chased out after her, close on her heels. She gasped it in, eyes fluttering, tears ripping their way down her face -- whether from fear or anguish or all the smoke, she didn't know. There wasn't time to think about it, hadn't been time to pay attention. With a shaky twitch of her hand in her hair, she managed to pull free a pair of bobby pins. Her tremors were so fierce, she nearly dropped one of them.

It took several terrifying minutes to pick the lock on the fire escape, and by then the smoke was flooding out around her, heat starting to build even from where she was, outside. She rushed her way through a quavery rendition of Not While I'm Around as she worked: demons may charm you with a smile for a while, but in time, nothin's gonna harm you! And then, like a queer little miracle, the lock popped free, the ladder dropped, and safety opened up green and a little rosebushy beneath her.

She thought, 'Tara, I know you had a hand in this. Thank you, thank you, thank you.' Her feet were on the first rung of the ladder, then her left foot was on the second one.

Her right foot was on the third.

Her hands were on the sides of the ladder.

The world was suddenly wonderful and full of delicious possibility.

Then Laney thought: 'Seymour.'

Seymour. Like a shot she was back up the ladder. With a gasp, and holding her nose like a novice swimmer, she climbed back through the window and into the second floor hallway.

It was now full dark, and the floor was hot through her slacks and on her left hand. She pulled the other away from her nose to crawl faster. She had forgotten her plant. It would only take a moment, and then they'd be out again, the ladder was already down. And on reflex, wasting her breath, she cheered herself once more:

"When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high -- and don't be afraid of the dark -- "

She could see almost nothing. Every open door looked the same, every room sooty gray and ashen. Was this door hers? Was it the next? The heat was unbearable. The dark was oppressive. The sounds -- screams --

She sang louder to be able to keep moving despite the sounds in the dark. It was all she could manage. Her singing voice was a series of disconnected sobs.

"At the end of the storm is a golden sky, and the sweet, silver song of the lark -- "

At last she found her room, though only by the plushy feel of the rug beneath her, the big fleece one that had once had a black-and-white cow-splotches pattern on it. And there was Seymour, on her desk, as she reached up blindly, sweat rolling down her arms.

"Walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain, though your dreams be tossed and blown -- "

She pulled the flowerpot down with slippery fingers, and hugged it to her chest like an infant. Safe now, they were safe now. They would be safe now.

There was light at her door. Orange light. It turned the smoke around her into a faded maroon. At first Laney didn't understand.

"Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart, and you'll never walk alone -- "

Fire.

She should have screamed.

It didn't even occur to her. She thought, 'Think about the sun, Pippin.'

The fire closed in on the two of them, the girl and her plant. Relentlessly, it claimed Laney's cozy fleece rug.

Then, just as relentlessly, the telescope, the laptop, the Felix the Cat pajamas.

"You'll never walk -- "

It consumed the whole of the room, and then that too was gone as though it had never been -- no room at all, no girl and no plant that had ever tried to live tiny little lives in it. Swallowed up, in one perfect flame.

And the fire moved on.

(ADMIN NOTE: SCALING IT BACK JUST TO MESS WITH YOU. ALL ROLLS UNDER 50 ARE DEAD MEAT. THIS AFFECTS PREVIOUS ROLLS.)

If Trace doesn't make it out, he blames RACISM and the white man tryin' to keep him downnnnn.

Edit: The white man kept him down.

[whistles]

-edit-

[[Okay in my defense the awesomeness made my brain break... soo this might be shitty?]]

Azzo was laying beside Melody, he was unaware of the fact of the matter, for perhaps if he had been aware he would've flailed right out of the bed. Of course one he would've removed himself from her personal space he would've went to crash on the floor or the couch or something...

But for now the hypnotist was knocked out cold. Visions of those that had been killed in the past few weeks filtered through his mind, he curled up unaware it was closer to Melody. Clinging, just a little bit to that last bit of hope, that list bit of desire that all this was a terrible dream.

Visions of Nacio and of Kimmie danced, and whirled. And as they did, as the innocence of them faded, replaced with that faintly heard song, 'I fell into the burning ring of fire. Down down down as the flames went higher.' The dreams slowly faded into nightmares, horrors of what he'd become. Continuing to dream of the deaths he'd caused and those he hadn't.

It was enough to make him feel ill, but something told him to stay there, not to open his eyes. That soon enough he would fall, and that burning ring of fire would consume him. It would take away all that had happened, all the bad. The hypnotist would never be known as a killer, maybe....

He wanted to go... he wanted to find those that had done this. He wanted to take something and beat their heads in. Bash them till there was nothing left but broken bones. In his dreams around him shadows rose, grinning, evil all of them. Beady red eyes as they laughed. He snuggled towards Mel, feeling the warmth of her body.

Yet he felt nothing and heared nothing but the song for some reason, it echoed in his head. The burning ring of fire....

As the boy slept, it felt like this was a new beginning. Well, subconsciously so. The night had been the farthest he'd gotten into the head of his closest friend. That little slip of a girl had made everything so much more special. There were prom festivities that needed planning and that's exactly what was going on in Topher's foggy little head. On this night there was no fantastical dreams about how succulent Yvette's flesh tasted. It was all different. Images of her opening the door for him in that beautiful dress, made even more beautiful by the technicolor colors his dream projected. He bowed, kissing her hand and giving her the white rose he had hid behind his back. Flashes of her smile. Flashes of them dancing and a dinner by candlelight.

...candles. Burning candles. Brilliant colors and wonderful smells. Lavender...lavender and smoke? SMOKE?!

Topher woke with a start, almost shaking from the assault on his senses. It was bright. Too bright. Everything was bathed in red and black. The boy frantically jumped from his bed, regretting the fact almost immediately as smoke burned his eyes and filled his lungs. Just by that simple action, he was forced to he knees, coughing and sputtering up ash. The fire got closer and closer, crawling up the legs of his desk like some sort of deranged creature trying to gain purchase on an unfamiliar branch before extending long fingers to grab at his floor rug. The cheap tassels igniting one after the other in a perfect line. Blackened tears began to stream down his face as bloodshot eyes fought against the flames to notice something. Anything that could help him. Topher crawled towards the other side of his bed, coughing, and trembling from the burning sensation that was traveling down his throat and settling deep in his chest. The flames engulfing his rug seemed to mock him, speeding up and slowing down in time to his movements. It was a race to the trash can. A race to something that would ultimately save his life. If he could just break the window...

The fire was through with this little game. One small cinder jumped onto the wicker trashcan just as his hand reached out. It felt like it was all over. Wicker? What was he thinking? Just then, the demented hand slithering across the desk found it's branch. His candles. The now dried oil quickly melted and began to bubble and blister, popping across the room as burning, rainbow splatter paint. One such drop landed on the boys hand, causing him to jolt up and cry out, cradling his burnt hand.

He could do nothing but gasp, let out small pitiful whimpers and pull his hand into his chest. Throat feeling as if it was closing, eyesight growing hazy, voice nearly gone, there wasn't much he could do but wait. Wait for someone. Wait for something...

In his scan of his room, everything covered in colored wax, one thing caught his eye. The pool stick! It seemed so far away but he couldn't take it any longer. If he could just get to it, all this would be over. The window was toast. If he wasn't so lucky, then at least it would go with him like some sort of memorial service. With what seemed like a burst of adrenaline, he dove for it, shielding the side of his face closest to the flame with a hand. The handle singed his fingers but Topher knew that he had to grin and bear it. This would break the window. This was his ticket out. He knew it.

The first strike against the window made the case bounce back and strike him between his eyes. Topher kept himself up, biting his bottom lip to keep himself composed until it bled. The second strike was harder; more frantic. The third made a satisfying crack.

He would have celebrated and kept bashing it against the window had he not felt an intense burning against his back. The fire really had gotten that close in his haste. One last chance. The boy, tears streaming and evaporating on his cheeks, threw the case as hard as he could against the window, hearing it protest.

One second...

Two seconds...

...and finally the glass whined and caved in on itself with a satisfying smash after what seemed like an eternity, the case rattling on the walkway outside as the hinges snapped from the force. Topher quickly grasped the window sill, pulling himself through bits of broken glass and catching parts of his body on panes that hadn't quite broken completely. None of that mattered as he himself fell to the walkway. The most satisfying cuts, scrapes and burns of his life.

They didn't even hurt, his body completely numb from shock. His fingers reached out to the pool stick, still pristine as when he'd first bought it. A sign that he'd made it out. His mind was too foggy to think of anything else as he stumbled his feet, holding the remains of the case and pool stick against his aching chest. Whatever breath that passed his lips was nothing more than a heaving wheeze as he hobbled away from the window and away from the dorms.

The strange haze from the smoke shifted him back into his dream. His hallucinations. Yvette. A dreamy smile crossed his face as he wobbled across the courtyard towards where he suspected people were gathering.

She would be waiting for him down the hill after he found the medics. That's where she would be. Arms open and waiting for him.

Yvette would be waiting for him...she would be.

He knew it...

Stop, Drop, and Die? *Will write a response*