Westbrook Academy for Metahumans: Forums

If your path takes you past the north wall of the school, you will notice this morning (in addition to a crowd of student gawkers), 3-foot high letters burned into the brick:

"Let's we forget".

Ar saw the message on the way to breakfast and laughed. "Yes," he said to the kid next to him, "'Let us all we forget.' We have any burny-type friends who're failing English? I mean, before the grades changed?"

Lorne looked back at Ar, "Maybe Nilesh. Sounds kind of poetic for him, though, doesn't it? I think he'd probably go with a more traditional, 'cocks' or something along those lines."

Laura's eyes grew large when she saw what had been burned into the wall. She ran off quickly, head down, hoping that none of the crowd had seen her.

Cadence stood at the back of the crowd, a hand over her mouth as she read the words on the wall. A few in the crowd were looking her way, as she was one of the few students at Westbrook with fire based powers. She ducked her head and started to walk away and was nearly run over by Laura. She offered a quick and hasty, "Sorry, sorry..."

Laura fidgeted in the hard, uncomfortable chair as Mr. Herrera watched her from behind his desk, fingers steepled: he watching the replay from the security camera the night before, she avoiding looking at him.

The video paused; a very familiar person burning words into the brick of the school. "Do you have an explanation?" he asked. "Why did you do it?"

Laura shrugged and racked her brain, trying to remember what she'd done the night before, but came up with a blank. As far as she knew, she'd slept straight through the night. But there was no mistaking the image on the screen. "I don't know, sir."

Herrera rose slightly from his chair when she answered, his face contorting oddly... but he closed his eyes deliberately, took a deep breath, and lowered himself back down. "This will be easier on both of us if you stop broadcasting."

Laura blushed; she started to glow brighter and the temperature jumped by a degree, but she threw more of her concentration into funneling her excess power into the stone around her neck.

Herrera was looking at her expectantly, and she considered telling him that she couldn't remember doing it, but that seemed... wrong somehow. Not that it wasn't the truth, but that it didn't feel right to say it.

She looked at her feet. "I don't know why, sir," she repeated.

Herrera sighed. "Well, at the very least, that's going to be one month's detention for destruction of school property, we'll reevaluate afterward."

Laura opened her mouth to say something... thought better of it, and just nodded.

She escaped the office as soon as she could. First period had just ended, the halls crowded with students, and she was forced to fight the crowd to get to her next class.