The ghost system

14 Acquaintances

Rhys was a deer in headlights as he stared at his roommate, the one guy in the entire freshmen class whom Rhys did not want to bunk with. The guy was an unreasonably powerful juvenile delinquent with homicidal tendencies who would probably not blink an eye about frying his new roommate to death. Furthermore, the system had warned Rhys that this delinquent's power would prove problematic to Rhys. The more Rhys thought about it, the more his heart rate began to rise.

Rhys watched anxiously as his roommate stared down at him with eagle eyes. He was like a seasoned butcher judging the latest cut of meat, deciding whether the meat could be left alone or needed to be sliced. Rhys gulped nervously shoving dry air down his tense throat.

Suddenly his roommate's predatory eyes softened. The acute sense of danger Rhys felt lessened but did not disappear. The delinquent stepped around Rhys as if he was nothing more than an annoying smudge on the floor, and headed straight into his bedroom. The loud thud of the door closing behind him was a warning to Rhys to keep out of his way.

After a moment of being stumped by what had happened, Rhys threw his head back in relief. Being ignored by the delinquent was a much better outcome than having to fight him. They would be roommates but nothing more, not even acquaintances since Rhys did not know the guy's name. They would just cohabitate, and that was fine with Rhys.

Rhys hobbled back into his room as the weight of the last two days manifested in his body. He opened the closet in his room and was glad to find a pair of military grey pyjamas and two extra pairs of grey military shirts and pants. Itching to get out of the room and away from the electric power station housed in the room next to his, Rhys set off down the hall to find the bathrooms with his pyjamas in hand.

To his surprise, the communal bathroom was only a few doors down from his room. The communal bathroom was spacious and clean with a line of twelve basins and mirrors across from a line of cubicled toilets, around the corner within the room were all the showers and one bath. Rhys plopped his stuff down at a sink and stared at himself in the mirror. His dreary blue eyes were rimmed with dark circles, his black hair looked haggard and his cheeks were sunken in.

['You look awful...']

Rhys's eye twitched and he clenched his fists. He wished that the system's teacher was a real living being and not a program, because that meant, one day, Rhys might find a way to physically put his hands around this jerk's neck and strangle him.

As Rhys was about to head to the showers, he noticed something about his hair, something odd. He leaned in closer to the mirror to take a better look. With his hand, he combed back his bird's nest and stared at the roots of his hair. He had black hair, pitch-black hair, and yet the roots of his hair had become white out of the blue...

Certain that he was hallucinating, Rhys hauled himself onto the sink to get an even closer look at his roots. He could only blink and hope for what he was seeing to change before he realised that his hair roots were indeed white.

"What the hell?"

There was only one possible reason his hair would randomly be changing colour on him.

"Does this have something to do with my transition?"

['Correct.'] The voice sing-songed in his head. ['The most noticeable mark of any worthy inheritor is soulless hair.']

"Soulless hair?" Rhys raised his eyebrows unimpressed. "Is that alien for badly bleached hair?"

['You ignorant ape. How dare you mock the illustrious white hair of the higher beings. Show some respect.']