The Rose of the Underworld

System Crash

"For the last time Ortho, there's no way I'm going." said Idia, stubbornly.

"But brother!" Ortho protested,
"You promised that you'd do anything for me when I hid you from the Leech twins last week."

"Yeah anything, but willingly put myself around a lot of people." the Ignihyde dorm leader remarked.
"I'm sorry Ortho, but I don't think even you can make me go. The students from the all-girls' school will be there right? So that means there'll be twice the amount of people, which gives me twice the reason for not wanting to go" he muttered, tinkering with the settings of his game.

"But it'll be fun!" the mechanical boy tried to reason with his older brother.

"And the game I'm playing has an active 50% EXP boost today with event exclusive drops and that's going to be more fun than a stupid school event." the older Shroud responded rather harshly.

"Please Idia-" Ortho begged.

"I've already said no every time you asked since the event was even announced, can you just go by yourself and let me play my game in peace?" the gloomy male snapped at him, cutting Ortho's sentence off, putting on his headset to drown out any of his further pleas.

Ortho sighed and quietly closed the door to Idia's dorm room and hovered away.

———————

Night Raven College and Dark Swan Academy were throwing a schoolwide welcome festival to celebrate their union. Choba and Riddle decided to attend together so he could be her guide as a familiar face from the opposite student body. 

"Trey's crepes were so good! The the pastry was incredible, the strawberries were perfectly ripe, and that chocolate was so rich and tasty." Choba replied, already wanting to relive that moment.

"Where did you want to head to next?" asked Riddle, looking around at the various other booths the two housewardens still had yet to explore.
The housewarden of the all-female Heartslabyul dorm unclasped her hands and still felt stickiness from the residual sugar and strawberry juice on them.

"Actually go on ahead without me, Riddle. I'm going to go use the washroom but thank you for accompanying me to Trey's booth!" Choba called out before stepping away in search of a restroom nearby. He nodded and walked off to approach Ace and Deuce who weren't too far away, as Choba ventured deeper into the foreign campus.

It was a longer trek than she thought, already losing count of the turns and hallways she passed on her way to find the restroom. After drying her hands on her gifted rose-embroidered handkerchief, she noticed a strange, blue glow in the distance of a darkened hallway and as she got closer to it, she saw a figure floating through the darkened halls, their fiery blue hair illuminating the stone walls.

Ortho sighed, trying to drown out the sound of joy and laughter coming from outside, that seemed to echo and bounce off the stone cold halls.

"It's just no fun going alone and being by yourself at at event where everyone is with their friends. Brother always says that it's a promise but what's the point when he never keeps them?" The mechanical boy quietly mumbled to himself, sulking between the hallways.

"A cyborg, no, android? My my, and I thought that Trivia's students made remarkable designs." Choba thought to herself, noticing the saddened Ortho. She immediately sensed his troubled demeanor and tried approaching him. The younger Shroud heard light footsteps and sensed an incoming body approaching through his internal radar. Turning around, he saw a short, female student most likely from the Heartslabyul dorm, walk up to him from the opposite end of the hall.

"Oh! My apologies, I didn't mean to scare you." said Choba as Ortho reacted to her presence.

"No worries, my sensors can detect other people within a ten-mile radius!" The mechanical boy chirped. Realizing that he was praising his brother's work, the same brother that snapped at him for just wanting to have fun at a school event together, Ortho's expression fell back into a disappointed frown.