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The noise, bustle and fluorescent lighting of the public school life may have been something new, foreign, and in many ways vaguely irritating for Vera. However, for Janice it was a familiar part of her daily routine to pack lunches, walk through overlit hallways, sitting in classrooms surrounded by people who honestly thought they were being clever hiding their cellphones under their desks while they exchanged text messages -- not that she went through any of this with any less irritation than Vera did. She just knew the ropes of it better.

Annoying ropes as they were.

Janice took a deep, calming breath as she stepped out the doors of the band room, another arduous rehearsal over at last. Public high school band indeed, she didn't know why she kept on with it; half the group had skill that borderlined on remedial. What she wouldn't give to find some way to get signed onto Hillworth's band, they still knew how to be strict with their standards. Their brass section didn't sound like a dairy farm built over a nuclear testing site.

She was lost in her harsh mental criticisms over the french horn player as she sped down the halls, intent on leaving the building and getting home quickly so she could get various other forms of work done. Her eyes almost completely missed the familiar cords of light red hair as they passed her by, but when they registered in her vision -- she stopped, turned, her clarinet case having loudly clatter to the floor and flown open to reveal the disassembled instrument within.

Her mouth was half-agape, her features fixed in a shocked and disbelieving expression, as if she had just seen a ghost.

Because, really, she pretty much had.

Janice had bent down to recollect her clarinet at this point, thoroughly ignoring the whispers and stares from her peers. She hadn't completely regained her composure, however, and was regarding Vera with a suspicious look that said pretty plainly that she wasn't sure she would be able to believe what she was seeing. Vera Valentine was dead -- no, only dead so far as the rest of the world knew. For the organization she worked for, she was one of the smarter youma created at Barren Pines.

She had kind of been holding out on the hope that since she wouldn't see Vera as a living human again, she would get lucky and have her as her youma when she got promoted to Captain.

But there she was. In Meadowview's uniform. Approaching her in Meadowview's hallway, acting no different than what Janice remembered of her.

She fastened her clarinet case, stood up, dusted herself off. After taken a couple of steps towards Vera, eyebrow pitched and a corner of her mouth pulled downward in her persistent disbelief, she said, "You're alive."

This was very strange. Janice had just gotten... used to the idea that Vera was dead.

They regarded each other for a moment, silently, the low electric hum of the lights overhead becoming more audible as the hallways emptied (Janice had always hated those lights). Hearing Vera's voice was as odd an experience as Vera's own was hearing Janice's, but at least it served to hammer her existence into the girl's reality a little better. It also made her wonder when was the last time Vera had anything to drink, but that was an irrelevant idle thought.

"A few weeks ago," Janice started to explain, "the newspaper ran an article about Barren Pines. It had a list of survivors -- you weren't on it."

"Survivors," she repeated, her eyes narrowing, broad jaw working around the aftertaste of the word. This was a little disquieting. Vera didn't seem to remember much of anything, and there was the possibility it was fortunate she remembered her friendship with Janice at all. She had overheard some secondhand accounts about other former Barren Pines students who had transferred to Meadowview (one of which was apparently Andeon Boskovic, which practically burst a blood vessel in her eye thinking about it), and by the looks of the lot of them either ended up dead or with no idea what they had been through.

Janice let her gaze slide away from Vera for a moment, trailing down the rows of doors and lockers in the hallway. It was relatively quiet, and extremely normal -- no acid dripping from the ceiling, no brief glimpses of monsters before they skittered out of sight.

"I can show you the article, if you'd like to stop by."

Lead the way she did, and a bus ride and a couple blocks of rapid-paced walking later, Janice had brought Vera to a two-story house with a greenhouse peeking out from the back yard. She produced a key, opened the front door, waved the other girl inside; the interior of the house looked fairly normal, all things considered. There was a bookshelf near the staircase, pictures on the fireplace mantle, standard ergonomical furniture.

"My parents both work at the hospital," she was saying, "so they're usually not home around this time of day. We can probably get away with ordering something if you get hungry and nothing in the fridge looks good."

There was a set of dominoes arranged into a half-finished game on the coffee table, with a notepad nearby: if Vera cared to take a closer look at it she'd be able to observe it was there to keep track of whose move it was.

"We've been working on that game for about a week. They take a while since we're usually not all home at the same time," Janice explained, as she examined the game herself. Along with schoolwork and band practice, her schedule had been getting increasingly booked as of late thanks to Negaverse work, and all the time she set aside for Franz (but she really could never get enough time for Franz). It was a bit irritating that it still wasn't her move quite yet -- but a slow-moving tabletop game wasn't why she brought Vera here.

"My room's upstairs," and she gestured towards the banister near the bookcase, before climbing up and leading Vera through another door.

If Vera had been expecting something less normal from Janice's home than she had seen so far, then the sight that greeted her upon entering her personal space was not very disappointing. There was an entire gift shop's worth of curiosities arranged on shelves, lined up on her desk and hanging from the walls: windup toys, board games, posters, preserved insects, Micro Machines, among other things. "Sit if you want to," she said, in spite of her chair having a stack of boxes on it, and she turned to a filing cabinet and started rummaging through one of its drawers.

"There is," she replied, her gaze shooting back to Vera for a second. "Or there is usually. I've been having trouble keeping up lately, but there's labels for where most of everything should be." She gave a gesture of her hand to the span of the room, waving it towards the shelves and her desk. Truthfully, some of those labels didn't really serve a purpose anymore. She'd lost a fair amount of pieces from various collections in the Barren Pines fire, and reorganizing everything while trying to replace everything else was proving to be quite a task.

After a moment she'd retrieved the newspaper article: neatly tucked in among others, carefully categorized, in the drawer she pulled it out of, which was left open while she descended to join Vera on the floor. She handed it out to her without another word, wanting to let her see the story for herself. Fake school, organ harvesting, few survivors -- and no Vera Valentine on the list of survivors, if she ignored how Janice had scrawled the name right under it.