Ozymandias Academy

Part 8

It had been awhile since Elle had had any new members added to her team. She had been working with J, K, and S for some time. Apparently they were the new dream team, something that Malia had told her that Elle had a sneaking suspicion she wasn't supposed to be talking about. Elle was pretty sure that all these kids were being trained for something bigger, something in the real world, but she couldn't quite figure out how doing puzzles was supposed to translate into anything in real life. Things started to click into place when P joined her team, replacing J.

P was a tall, thin boy, with a crop of very nice thick hair that was the extra annoying kind that looked good no matter which way he pushed it. And he did fiddle with it a lot, shoving it out of his eyes every couple minutes. Elle found herself very distracted by it, then remembered that she also appeared to be a boy, and she didn't want to scare P away. He was good at the more practical aspects of the game; he never had to go to any of the NPC's for help, because he somehow knew everything. But in the few games that Elle played with him, she never once saw him solve a puzzle. He let the others do the heavy lifting in terms of sheer logic, but seemed to be on par with them when it came to overall brainpower.

Elle found P to be very interesting. She would have tried to find out who he was if the game didn't create a horrid shrieking noise in their ears if their techs heard them say anything that could possibly be used to determine their real names or locations or anything. One way to get around it was to communicate with sign language, which K and S had figured out. As long as they pointed their heads just slightly away, the cameras the techs used to monitor them wouldn't catch the rapid hand movements just out of sight. K and S were very close, and Elle suspected they knew who the other one was. She wished she could be a part of that. More so, she wished she could have that kind of extra connection with P.

But P would have to wait. Elle let herself get killed a little earlier than she would have usually; since she knew the game didn't really have an ending, she was okay with letting herself die. Though she couldn't do it too early, that made Malia suspicious. Elle had been using her deaths wisely, taking the time when she wasn't being followed to scope out the edges of the simulation. She learned that the only way out of the school building was through the front doors, which she couldn't touch in her ghost state. Malia always started asking questions when she got close to the doors, making things very difficult for Elle. Elle would always say she was just trying to learn the halls better, since she felt she had a good grip on the puzzles, and Malia seemed to accept that as an answer, but Elle knew she wouldn't keep accepting it for long.

One day not too long after P joined, Elle let herself be killed and started running towards the front doors. They were pretty close - she had figured out pretty fast that the closer to the front doors she died, the less effort it took for her to try to get out. Apparently Malia was asleep at her station or something, because Elle saw a girl, presumably a part of the simulation, walking in through the front doors and saw her chance. She ran up behind the girl and slipped past her just as the doors were closing, and found herself outside of the school for the very first time.

The first thing she did was look behind her to make sure she really made it out. The bricks of the school loomed large and imposing behind her, but ahead of her was nothing. It wasn't the pastoral views of fields and trees that she had observed from the windows inside the school. There was just... nothing. It was like the Void, only the Void still had substance somehow. Like there was a floor for her to stand on, and she felt like she could summon objects out of the nothingness. But here, it was different. It was bright, for starters. And the edges of the simulation just trickled off, some pieces extending a bit further than others, but all of it ending just a few feet away from the outside doors.

Elle decided to circle the building, taking care to stay close to the school walls. She wasn't sure why, but she didn't feel safe stepping into the blank emptiness. When she got closer to the boundaries where the world of the game stopped, she heard an odd noise. It felt almost like static, the kind you get from bad reception on the TV or when talking on the phone. Elle could actually feel it inside her head, like her brain was going fuzzy. She almost wanted to see how far away she could get, but the buzzing grew even more unbearable the closer she got to the whiteness, so she stopped trying that pretty quickly.

As she drew closer to the back of the school, where a courtyard should have been based on what Elle had seen out the windows, there stood a group of adults, all dressed in white. They had their hands raised in a position familiar to Elle. They were casting some sort of spell on the school wall. The closer she got to them, the more the static feeling eased from her head. Perhaps they were doing maintenance on the simulation from within? Maybe they were the physical representation of some techs working on some of the programming. But then why could Elle see them? Why would they bother programming in visible versions of themselves in the place that nobody was supposed to be? This must have been the crossover between magick and technology that Elle just didn't understand.

As she stood and pondered, one of the adults turned to her and seemed to make eye contact with her. His eyes grew wide. Elle barely had time to realize that they had seen her - they shouldn't have been able to see her after she got eliminated - before the strange man pointed both his hands at her and made a shoving motion, pushing away from his chest. Elle felt like she had been suddenly lifted by the wrists and spun away, going into the empty white expanse behind her. She closed her eyes, scared of what might have been coming next.

But it was just her usual room. Which was odd, since she was still wearing the goggles. She was tempted to remove them, but wasn't sure if she should. Was she thrown into a secret level somehow? That was a possibility. Maybe she had to find the differences between the simulated room and the real room.

Then she heard Malia's voice. "Emergency scrubbing protocol - activate."

Emergency scrubbing protocol? Elle didn't like the sound of that. She just stood as still as she could, waiting for something bad to happen. She did feel a slight tingling run from her feet all the way up to her head, where it stayed for a moment before dissipating. A computerized voice said, "Scrubbing complete." Malia sighed. Elle was distracted by the fact that she could hear Malia in the room, but could not see her since she was still wearing the goggles. Too distracted to notice that for the first time since she joined the game, her memories had stayed intact.