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THE ACADEMY WAS SLIENT in the dead of night as it had been for years and years. The walls of the giant house shook slightly from the howling wind outside. Giant raindrops pattered against the old windows of the building, rattling them only slightly. The academy was nearly deserted, not quite, but nearly. One of the caretakers of the house, which the past occupants of the house called Pogo, sat in his small square room in the basement of the house, on his even smaller bed, not that he minded though. The monkey structured man was in fact rather small, and had gotten way too used to the small bed that sat in the middle of the small, cold room after years and years of sleeping, on the small bed, in the small room.
Pogo was wearing many layers of clothing, something else that he had gotten rather used to over the years, yet he still shivered, the cold air that surrounded him crept up his fur like covered skin. The basement rooms always got cold on nights like this where the rain pored down endlessly, unforgivingly. So there the caretaker sat, alone in a cold silence, a silence that he had gotten uncomfortably used to.
However, he wasn't the only one. Two floors up from her coworker, her friend, sat Grace. Unlike Pogo, Grace's boss had never given her a room, a bed, a place to sleep, although she didn't need it. She was brought along by Mr. Hargreeves himself. Reginald realized that the children, his children, needed someone to raise them, a mom, for surely he wasn't going to do it. So he constructed a mom for his children, and a mom she was. Mr. Hargreeves hadn't given her a purpose, but her children had. And not a day went by in the comfortably silent house that Grace didn't miss her children, although she had a reminder of how things used to been that lay three floors below in a seemingly endless slumber.
In a rather large spacious room, a floor below where Pogo sat, lay Alexandra Hargreeves, the last child that Reginald Hargreeves had adopted nearly thirty years ago. The room where Alexandra lay was cold, colder than Pogo's room, ice cold, and for good reason. In the center of the room was where Alexandra slept. There was a small, hospital-like bed that was placed in the middle of the room and on it Alexandra lay, in a dark, snore-less, dream-less sleep. Glass walls and roof enclosed her in her bed, almost like a clear box. In that clear box, it was cold, much colder than the air that filled the room though, but just warm enough so it wouldn't kill the small girl that slept there quietly. Reginald Hargreeves has insisted on it, saying that it was the only way to keep the young girl alive. So there the girl lay, for nearly seventeen years. The cold that enclosed her had temporarily frozen her aging process, leaving her looking the same as she did when she was first frozen; young and fifteen. Both Pogo and Grace had realized that none of the girls features had changed, and she looked exactly how she looked when she was a teenager, even though now she consciously aged to thirty. And even though the caretakers hated seeing her enclosed and frozen day after day, it still had given them a sense of comfort. Everything and everyone else had changed, and it made them happy to know that Alexandra had not one bit.
