The Sketch Survivors: The Enemy Among Us

New Beginnings

It was a pleasing ride through the fields. The devoted, yet mundane bus carried Alice and Soal on their way to the developing boarding school. They both sat patiently among a crowd of others, each awaiting their own destinations.

Finally, the bus slowed, and eventually froze. Alice gestured for Soal to get up and out the door, but he was hesitant.

"Well? Everyone's waiting," the scrawny bus driver was patient as well. "This is your stop, isn't it?"

"I think I'm ready," Soal decided to get up out of his seat now, rather than sooner, and Alice appeared playfully annoyed with him.

The bus driver was much more compassionate than Soal expected from this kind of situation. "Watch your step," she warned of the steep stairs leading out of the narrow door. Alice and Soal heeded that advice. Then the bus doors closed, the driver tipped her hat to them, and the old gray bus slowly got off to a start again; passing by a speeder pulled over by a police car.

"I've never seen such irony," Soal mumbled to himself. It would not have mattered if Alice had heard him speak or not. The boarding school, construction still underway, had its foundations laid down, and the courtyard was almost finished. It sat in the middle of a wide field of tall grasses, fresh with life and bending in the breeze.

"This is it," Alice placed her hands on her hips, proud of her work. "Shirley said she would be here soon. You might have to wait."

They stood in the courtyard for a moment, until Soal voiced a request of his. "Is it possible I could explore the interior?"

"Yes," Alice affirmed, "but you've got to be extra-careful of the parts that are unfinished."

"I'll try hard."

"Go ahead, then."

He walked solemnly into the inside through the large, bland doors, and returned to what would eventually become a nightmare. These were the same doors through which Gulley arrived and offered Soal's Sketch. What a life he would have lived if he had let it burn in the fireplace.

Instinctively, he raced up the steps at the end of the hall and up more steps on the right, searching for his old residence. He found it quickly; but the door and the area surrounding it was unfinished. Something was written on the wooden boards upon which Soal was now standing, and he peered down to read them.

2D

The term had about the same penmanship as a Fviron, but this was it. Room 2D, where he had slept for a few nights before Gulley's arrival, which characterized this experience for him. Through the door, through which he was not permitted to pass by Alice's expectations, he could make out the area where his bunk-bed would be, and where Marsh's bunk-bed would be. Emma had probably slept in a different room.

He returned to the first floor, and wandered its (completed) rooms, reminiscing of a time long past, and entering rooms he had never seen before. He had gone all the way from the boarding school, to the Kiwi Realm, to the Sketch Facility, to the boarding school again. When would he settle down for good?

Well, that was the exact reason he went back in time in the first place, aside from Moth's theoretical plan of action. But he had not truly settled with Alice. He just wanted to do so before something launched his life back into peril, which was inevitable.

Returning to the boarding school had changed his outlook on going back to all of the elements of his old life. But in his precious bag of possessions, which he had not checked since he made the time jump, there lay a treasure once greater to him than even Irene. And it was up to Soal whether or not to put it to good use.