Specials

Chapter 24- Reality

The first thing Dawn felt was a tearing sensation, like her mind was pulling apart. Her eyes snapped open, and she was sitting in a chair, hooked up to electrical cords and sensors. She looked around, frantically, and saw the rest of her team waking up sleepily. Kia was still a ghost. Jahnavi slipped off her shoes and sighed as the black dust still only lightly dusted her toes. Dawn felt immensely relieved. There was a moment there, near the end, where it felt so overwhelmingly real and painful and traumatizing that Dawn was almost certain that it was real. But it was a simulation after all.

"Congratulations, team," Tanya smiled warmly as the same woman as before set to work untangling the team from their configuration of wires. "You have successfully defeated the enemy with the least amount of deaths. This means that you have won." The other teams, who Dawn noticed were still gathered in the room, broke out in polite, yet defeated applause. Dawn expected to feel triumphant as she joined hands with her team members at the front of the stage, freed from their electric bonds, but something didn't feel quite right. She felt like something was missing. Tanya was going on about how great an honor it was, how much the team had matured during the short simulation, ect, when it hit Dawn.

"Where's Angel?" Dawn interrupted Tanya.

"What?" Tanya looked confused.

"The person we picked up halfway through the middle! You know, dark hair, metal wings. They were stuck in a glitch, but we saved them!" Dawn's voice rose in pitch and panic as she continued speaking.

Tanya chuckled nervously, "I'm afraid that may have been just a trick of the simulation. We've never had a student named Angel here."

"NO! I KNOW they were there! There was no way Angel was just simulated! They were way too complex to be a ho-"

"Go to your dorms right now," Tanya interrupted Dawn this time, her voice filled with a cold, hard edge that Dawn had never heard before. "Everyone in this room, go to your dorms." Everyone stared confusedly up at Tanya. "NOW!" Tanya boomed, and everyone practically sprinted out of the room, voices murmuring about what they had just witnessed.

When Dawn entered the hallway that led to her room, she caught the faint smell of smoke. The smell got worse when she opened the door, and when she opened the door all the way, Dawn saw why. James was standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by the charred remains of Dawn and Chameleon's stuff.

"What the f***?!" Chameleon yelled loudly from behind Dawn when she saw the carnage. Slowly, James turned around to face them, fireballs in his hands smouldering sinisterly. Dawn gasped when she saw him. It was James, but it was if a dark, dangerous something had invaded his body. His eyes were a pure black, like someone had poured oil into his sockets, and his veins stood out on his sickeningly pale skin, veins so dark that they seemed to be pumping the same oil that filled his eyes. A gross, creepily wide grin spread across James' face, and he spoke with a voice that was grating and not at all his.

"Finally," black smoke filled the room, pumped from James' hair and the fireballs in his hands, "You've come back for me."

The End