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Roch hadn't been completely out of it. Danny probably didn't realize it, but the punk had been hitting the streets every night since the disappearance. He would search the streets, then go to the casino to ask if Vegas had found a way around passports. Vegas always said no. Then he would ask if anyone on the shadier side of Halloween had heard anything. There were only rumors, and most of those were lies.

Roch hadn't gone into this with much hope to begin with. He knew how quickly the weaponization process took. He... he just didn't know where to go to, now. There were the horsemen, sure, but as much as Roch respected them, he still remembered the pictures of murdering humans on their walls... and the insanity that had marked his prom date. He wouldn't be surprised if most of the remaining horsemen weren't infected. That didn't make them less of an option. But--

There were still the teachers. Roch's estimation of the teachers had gone up just a tiny bit after defenders (frankly, it couldn't have gone lower.) And he was desperate. So that's why he and Danny were heading into the auditorium, looking for a surly, hard to deal with man. Yeah, he thought, this might be a waste of time.

The teacher had Beethoven's 7th playing as he worked filling out what looked to be city fire safety regulations. One paper had a form on getting permission for indoor fireworks. Apparently that one had been rejected going by the red 'NO' stamp on it. An appeals form sat shuffled by it, with a liberal use of 'jacking' and 'slime sucking' applied to the text.

Looking up from his paperwork at the sound of students, he pushed up his glasses. "Backstage, stage left. My office. Mind the pit." He went back to the paperwork. He'd get his fireworks and his slime spray. He would get it jack damn it of he was not suited to be any sort of director.

Danny was an idiot. Stage left? That was like normal left, but on the stage, right?

So Danny went stage right, and found herself staring at the wall of the stage right wing, tucked in between the two curtains. "Um ... hello? There's no office here ..."

She then realized that Roch had gone the entirely opposite direction and scurried off after him. Oops. Once Danny had made it into the office as well, she said, "You meant stage right!"

"Danny, it's backwards," Roch said simply. "And it's Roch," he added to the director. "We--jack, I'm just gonna go straight to the heart of it. You were here twenty years ago or so, when the defenders were around, when there was a lake and hunters, and when they captured and killed pretty much most of the class, weren't you." It wasn't really a question.

"Well, prof, we found the lake again. We found the hunters, too, but this time we were kickin' a** thanks to that freaky priestess from the horsemen--but things went... wrong."

Improvisation. The art of pretty much 'making s**t up as you go'. Whereas Arel might have been horrible at it, Rengath was just just a little bit better.

AKA, not very good. He'd thought improv more a comical style, and only used it when a flub would happen and they needed to recover. Now? Now there was a big fat flub in front of him called the jack damn defenders and the year he and other ******** up everything.He stood slamming the door behind them and pushing the pair into two small seats.

Red eye narrowed as his sat down, seat giving a small creak as he wheeled it back to his desk. "One, I'd say to check your sources before making an accusation. Two, why jack damn's forsaken name would you try to find a lake?" His nails raked into the wood of the desk. Oops. "Three, what do you mean by hunters. Four, what priestess, and five-"

His anger was thinly veiled. "Yin, Mei, Amrita and Zar are missing. Explain what happen." He took a breath. "Details. Now."

Danny could hear the ... anger? in his voice. No, maybe not that. It was more sadness than anything else.

She clamped a hand over his mouth and said, "Sorry, just ..." She sighed. "We were just wondering if you'd seen them ... or maybe you could ... help us find our friends?"

Her hand fell from Roch's face, but she hit him on the back where the teacher couldn't see. A year of friendship would tell him that meant be nice.

"Arel's office was a mess, so some kids started sneakin' in, and they found a tunnel that led to these lockers that had stuff that belonged to the guys that died in the past. Tex was my uncle, I wanted his stuff. So I broke in with some others--but there was a guy in a cloak--a hunter, and he had a phone, so people tried to talk to him, wound up destroying him--he was a fake body, its weird, and he left the phone. On the phone was a map and some passcodes--so we... used them to go down to the lake underground."

He shook his head. "We shouldn't have, we know. But we did. Down there we found the lake, but it was frozen over, even the hotheads like Danny couldn't melt it. And then it changed into a trap and we got electrocuted, and the hunters showed up--then the horsemen showed up and we started knocking off the fake body hunters--it was this huge back and forth thing, until they got out the trap guns and started catchin' us in nets that shocked people. Then everything went... boom, I guess, we dissipated, and wound up in Cricket's office--without Amphi or Amrita. Or the other guys."

The slapped his palm to his face. These kids...

"So let me get this right. You broke into Arel's office, snuck into a secret tunnel, found someone, attacked and killed them but not really, went to the lake, walked into a trap, the jacking horsemen showed up on school grounds, you kill more of these fakes, almost get captured by them, ended up in the infirmary, then find out some students are missing."

He rubbed his temples. "Did I understand you both correctly?"