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 Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 7:08 pm
The books made slightly more sound hitting the table than Nihls did altogether... but that was more or less how he felt it was safe to be around Vera. He liked libraries. They were usually decently well lit, and virtually anything of any given importance was... well. Black and white to begin with.
He let them rest on the table for a heartbeat or ten, fingertips gently resting to either side of them. This was for two reasons. One of them was to give Vera a chance to react, the other was because it made it a lot easier to grab his books and =run like blazes= for cover if Vera's reaction was... well. Hostile.
She was very good at hostile. Very good. He'd done one mimicry of her behavior, (Her infamous pencil twiddle) and he'd come alarmingly close to bleeding as a result.
Actually... the part that frightened him most about that past experience was that he was pretty sure she'd hit exactly what she was aiming for.
"...Should be an interesting year with the new transfers..." He noted, in a passing token at conversation, after he became reasonably assured that his presence was not, for the moment anyway, an suicidal gesture. Weather or not she responded seemed like it could go either way, but making casual conversation was one of those things you just did. He couldn't really remember the last time they'd had transfers, they must have at some point, but it was one of those things that slipped his mind as unimportant and not worth keeping on record. Any transfers they'd had had been quietly absorbed into the contented blur of life at Barren Pines and since become comfortably familiar and part of the routine, sort of like this. Joining Vera in the second floor Study area.
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Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 7:48 pm
Vera was, yet again, doing that rather infamous spin of her pencil as she pored over one of her dreaded math books. It had occasionally been the despair of some of her poor teachers that while she could accurately calculate the trajectory for a given object when thrown by a certain person, she could never translate that into anything more useful for school. But she wanted to do well in school, well enough to stay here anyway. There was a vague thought that perhaps there were other schools, but Barren Pines had certainly always been an option, and one she'd taken when it was offered.
Nihls arrival, carefully heralded by the thump of his books hitting the table, was noted most especially by a sudden stillness. Vera hadn't looked up, hadn't even seemed to notice that he was there, but oh - she knew. And he knew that she knew, and so on and so forth. It was so nice to have someone around who appreciated these things, it really was. As a welcoming, and non-threatening gesture, Vera finally looked up and offered something that might charitably be called a smile.
"Oh?" she commented in reply, a single word that could mean almost anything. 'Oh? Are they going to be more interesting than the last batch?' or perhaps 'Oh? Do you know something that I don't?' One was never sure, until Vera finished her brief statements. "Perhaps," was all the clarification she offered, however.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:03 am
"Well... it will at least temporarily throw the established order for a loop." Nihls offered, trying to interpret her reaction based on those two words, as he unstacked books and flipped open a notebook, prying an slightly chewed looking pen off the front cover. Of course he would be particularly interested in changes in how people reacted to each other.
"...Not to mention the play." That alone was going to cause a certain degree, he imagined, of frenzy, and egos inflating to the bursting point, and then a lot of ego-wilting when the actual cast was posted. Humility was not necessarily a trait familiar to a number of students, and he would have been lying if he said that he didn't hope to see a few egos taken down a notch or two.
Or at least it would be interesting to see how fast some of them figured out the surprising accuracy with which Vera could throw things. Of course he wouldn't have minded some of her accuracy of throwing calculation either, since his own difficulty came from understanding certain material, no matter how well he could recite it from memory.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:36 am
Somebody had left a radio in the study area -- a boombox, more technically, though that was weird enough as boomboxes belonged in one place and one place only: 1983. Anyway, it was odd to have any kind of radio in the study area with the big sign saying PEACE AND QUIET OR WE'LL KILL YOU! (And who had put that there? Possibly Hero and Giselle, though it seemed a bit frivolous.)
It was battery-run, and had clearly been off. Which was odd when it suddenly crackled to life, blaring white noise interspersed with static, a kind of bizarre bleeeening on the table in front of Nihls and Vera.
This seemed to only be asking Vera to peg it with something, but most importantly: the radio was coming to life. On the FM station of "Best Of The Test Channel", apparently.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:46 pm
"Perhaps," Vera said again, rather noncommital. She wasn't particularly interested in those who considered themselves the 'established order'. There was no reason for her to be, after all. Momentarily glancing back down at her homework, Vera's violet eyes flickered back towards Nihls.
"Play?" she echoed, sounding, for her, rather curious. There was a vague thought that she'd perhaps seen a flyer or something regarding audtions, but it was simply another one of those things that she didn't pay attention to.
Unfortunately, the sudden interruption of the boombox (what was one of those doing here?) was nigh impossible to ignore, causing Vera to twitch and send a pencil flying towards it before she could really think about what she was doing. Since she hadn't thought about it, it flew in the direction of the offending and abrasive noise, and she turned slightly to see where exactly her throw would hit. Hopefully somewhere that would end the earsplitting annoyance.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 3:59 pm
"Something Miss Johnson is..." He started to explain, then jumped sharply at the unexpected crackle and hiss of noise from the radio. When he'd first seen it he'd wondered if someone had been using it with headphones for some kind of language study, but the expected noise still made him jolt like an electrified cat, half jumping up and banging his knee on the table painfully as Vera, in her own response, chucked an .2 hardness, graphite and wood javelin at it.
Even with his heart now pounding (and kneecap throbbing), it seemed immediately ridiculous to have jumped at the noise, and he reddened in embarrassment at his own reaction.
"Tch." The sound was derisive and a little breathy, hissed angrily from behind clenched teeth. Must have been one of the other students playing a prank. One of them was probably lurking somewhere with a remote... "...Obnoxious out dated piece of..." He grumbled, trying to soothe his aches by deriding the malfunctioning boom box. If Vera's pencil hadn't taken it out, he'd simply check and see if he could turn it off... or at least find the remote switch that had so obviously flipped it on.
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:55 pm
The pencil hit the boom-box with ease; it didn't really do anything, because it was a fairly heavy object, and the crackling continued. The static was wheeling in and out now, as though there was extremely grainy music being played on the other end -- or a voice? It went FWIP GARGLE GARGLE FWIP MMMMPHHH FWIP FWIP BZZZTT --
And there was a voice that was suddenly barely comprehensible in it.
FWIP ZZTTT "BARR... INES?" FWIP ZZTTT "GET OU..... GOTTA... LEAVE SCH... ET OUT...." FWIP ZZT ZZZT "..T OUT..."
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Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2009 7:25 pm
Vera had been about to agree with Nihls' assement, when her pencil hit the mark. Not nearly enough to do any sort of damage, she'd been hoping that it would hit the power button. She stood with a sigh, about to manually turn it off when the static cleared for a moment.
She froze, hand comically frozen over the please be malfunctioning equipment, turning her head to look back at her study partner. "Nihls," she said flatly. "Please tell me you heard that."
Please let her not be going crazy, or something. The acid dripping monster from the other night had not been a hallucination, Janice's note with her name and room confirmation enough of the reality of this situation. But this...this could...
What was going on around here? It had never been like this before.
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Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:32 am
Nihls froze in place for a moment, then yanked his hand back as though the radio were producing a stinging static field. He was still trying in some part of his brain to reassure himself that it was just an creepy, well orchestrated prank, but the animal part of his brain that civilized human beings generally ignored was on it's soap box, yelling profoundly that this was not only abnormal but NOT to be ignored, on penalty of being eaten by a Sabretooth, bear, or rodent of unnatural size.
This entire soap box rant was certainly made more credible by VERA's alarm. Very the fearless. Vera of the deadly pencil. Vera the inexplicably shaken by staticky voices.
Weather or not he'd be able to repeat it later was a good question, but he certainly wasn't -forgetting- that voice any time soon.
"I... uh... I...." He managed, which for someone who'd turned that many shades paler was probably as good a confirmation as any.
Come to think of it... WAS there a student with mechanical and electronic aptitude? There was one with chemical mixing skills that induced alarm in everything but rocks but...
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Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2009 9:06 pm
The radio kept crackling in and out of sense. The problem was, Vera's pencil had rather neatly hit the power button -- but either the aim had been a little off and not enough pressure to make it go down, or... was there any other option? Was there really any other solution? The radio kept on crackling.
FWIP ZZZTTT "ALL D... LL DEAD?" FWIP ZZZT FWIP WIP "CAN... GE... UT, ALL... EAD.... ALL... D... ALL..."
And then it was suddenly silent -- with one last crackle of static, it went as dead as it had been when they came into the study area. Ominously silent, even, as Vera and Nihls stared.
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Posted: Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:47 pm
"Focus, Nihls," Vera ground out, trying very hard not to roll her eyes as she stared at the radio suspiciously. As soon as it had crackled off into silence, she yanked her pencil out, frowning slightly when she realized the tip had broken off inside the device. "So." She tapped the pencil against her chin, once, then spun to face the other teen.
"What was that supposed to mean?" The transmission hadn't been very clear, true, but it had been clear enough to her to figure most of it out. And she was almost dreadfully certain that it had been a warning - though of what exactly she couldn't tell, only that it made her recall the other odd occurance with another shiver of fear.
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Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:15 am
"OK. How about this. I'm focused on the radio being incredibly creepy." Nihls protested with an uncomfortable shudder. "Does anyone own one of those..." he gesticulated vaguely, trying to find the term he was looking for. "Those stupid toys that let you take over a radio broadcast at short range?"
It could still be a joke. He wanted to believe it was still a joke even though every hair on the back of his neck was standing on end.
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Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:40 am
If it was a joke, it was one of those obscure ones that Vera would never understand. "I don't know," she said, trying very hard not to roll her eyes. There was a lot about her fellow students that Vera didn't know - nor did she particularly want to know, either.
Even if it would prove this to be some horrible, horrible prank. "Can you think of anyone?"
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Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 9:13 am
Nihls shook his head vigorously, staring at the radio and moving in a slow half circle around it's place on the table for a better look. Maybe there would be some other sign of tampering. "...Not that I can think of. Doesn't match the behavior of anyone I can think of off the top of my head. Also they have a limited range. Otherwise we can check for signs of tampering... or some kind of mark of ownership."
Even here, surely someone would mark their property? If nothing else they could see if it was school property, which might reveal who had left it here with enough investigation.
"...If it's a joke it's not a very funny one, and if it's not a joke... then I don't know what to make of it."
It seemed to imply that they should actually -FLEE- Barren Pines... but even that seemed... in it's own right... alien.
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Posted: Sat Nov 14, 2009 7:56 pm
"I didn't think boomboxes could pick up transmissions like that," Vera said thoughtfully; that was possibly the longest sentence Nihls had ever heard her string together. "Unless somone is operating a radio station that thinks we're all dead," she finished flatly, tapping the end of her pencil against her chin again while she waited for the results of the examination, not seeming at all out of sorts that someone out there might think that. It wasn't unreasonable, to her.
"...A joke?" That hadn't even crossed her mind.
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