I didn't understand what I was seeing when I entered into E890.
The classroom was the largest out of all of the ones on the upper floor, and easily held every student and inspector in the school with even breathing room for everyone. One of the weirder aspects of the situation was that there were no teachers. At every other inspection, there had been teachers nearby, or walking around. But not here. Not even Mrs. Jarven was in the room to announce Mr. Neilson's presence.
Mr. Neilson stood up on what looked like a makeshift stage built from wood and plastic. He held a wireless microphone in his hand, and his voice blew out of the speakers in different parts of the room as he spoke.
"Welcome, students. I'm extremely excited for you all to be able to participate in this specific inspection activity." My eyes roamed around the room, still not understanding. Still trying to figure out what was going on. They stopped at every inspector standing around the corners of the room, and then continued on to the next large shape that was attracting my attention. A large, gray, circular shape. Actually multiple gray blotches around the room.
Each one had a visible door and each door was shut tightly closed. The outsides of the shapes were mostly metal and there were three steps covered in a carpet like material leading up to the doors. Just glancing around the room, I already counted possibly twenty different gray structures.
"As you can all tell, we have brought in some newer technology for all of you to try out in this activity." He waved his hand around the room to indicate the odd structures. Every student looked around and murmurs rose from the crowd.
"These are how we are planning on putting you through assigned simulations."
He paused after the word simulations, allowing the crowd to react. It felt like he was an actor of a play, and was giving out lines trying to pique the interest of the crowd. And it was working.
"Each simulation will force you all to carry out specific tasks. Your goal is to complete the specific task in a timely fashion, and get the best possible score you can get. Afterwards, you all will be ranked based on how well you completed your tasks, and everyone in the bottom third of rankings will be doing chores tomorrow."
After mopping a dirty hallway floor for two hours, I was definitely not in the mood to go through that again.
"Good luck."
The microphone shut off and Mr. Neilson stepped off the stage.
The crowd began talking all at once, a cacophony of noise filling the room. People began to shift in different directions, and after a minute or so visible lines were being formed in front of each of the gray containers. I quickly got in one of the lines, not wanting to be forced to stand in the back of a line for a long time. I'd already had enough of that from my Animus fitting.
The line moved faster than I expected as students walked into the door of the container and then walked out looking disoriented. Many of the students who finished looked confused, like they didn't understand at all how the world worked.
Then I was stepping up the carpeted steps and opening the door to a completely black chamber. It felt like walking into a dark cave, and I couldn't see anything once the door came shut behind me. I walked to what I believed to be the center of the circular floor, and tried to look around to see if I could make out anything or anyone else in the miniature room.
Then lights came glaring on from the walls surrounding me. Even the floor lit up, a bright white color that filled my vision. Black dots appeared in front of me and then something lifted up from the floor and pressed against my leg. My vision was messed up from the sudden glaring light and so when I felt the sharp pinch of something on my arm, I was shocked by it. But by then, I couldn't move, and I could now see small patches of plastic probably mixed with something else pressed against my skin like stickers.
The world began to fade slightly as my senses dulled. As I stared down at the patches, they slowly began to disappear. My skin was normal once again, and I wasn't attached to anything. When I looked up again, the walls were no longer white. Actually, the walls weren't even there.
Instead a vast city landscape was laid out in front of me.
And I wasn't alone.
Other people in the street that I realized my feet were planted on. And when I inspected them closer I realized they were all other students. All of the gray containers were happening at once, and every simulation was apparently connected.
And then I noticed Pepper standing only a couple yards away. Actually, not really standing. It was more like she was appearing. Her body slowly pixelated into existence.
I walked over to where she was now standing, and she looked over at me as I came near her. Her eyes lit up in recognition, before she continued to observe our surroundings, probably wondering what task Mr. Neilson had been referring to.
"Has anything happened yet?" she asked once I was within hearing range of her.
"No...I just appeared here too." I noticed a couple more students appearing in random spots along the street.
"Do you know what we're supposed to do?"
Sudden gunfire rang out above the voices of the crowd of people on the road.
I ducked down towards the ground automatically, just as shouts rang out from other students in the crowd.
Gunshots?
What?
Another round of bangs exploded from somewhere above our small group of students who were all cowering close to the ground. They were coming from above us, in the rooftops of the skyscraping buildings and higher level windows.
More rounds of gunfire rained down at us and then someone was crying out loudly, and the crying didn't stop. I looked up from where I was stooped down and noticed a group of people creating a sort of circle around a figure that was lying on the ground, and I realized the figure had been shot. Then the body dissolved into thin air, and the crying stopped.
But it left an impression.
People now looked genuinely fearful for their lives.
I looked over Pepper whose eyes mimicked the fear in everyone else.
"What is happening?" she whispered, looking close to tears. I could see the horror in her entire expression and hear the way her voice cracked when she talked. She hadn't even imagined that something like this could happen. I hadn't even considered this as a possibility for a simulation.
But it was. I couldn't change what I had no control over. And at the moment, sitting around waiting to get shot at didn't seem like the best idea. I grabbed tightly onto Pepper's hand and began sprinting down the road in the opposite direction of the crowd of people. A couple shots followed after us, but none of them hit.
My feet pounded against the pavement as we ran, and soon the crowd of other students was far behind us. I paused in the middle of the street, bringing Pepper to a stop along with me, and stared up at the windows of the buildings surrounding us, wondering if whatever enemy that was shooting at us happened to be spread throughout the entire city and if so, why they weren't shooting at us.
I got my answer when something exploded in a ball of fire to the right of me, sending me rolling across the pavement, my hands and knees scraping against the ground. My hand was no longer gripping Pepper's. The world wasn't upright anymore either, everything seemed to be tilted slightly to the side and extremely blurry. A loud ringing bounced around in my head and I groggily brought my hands up to my ears, trying to shut out the noise but it was inside of me. When I realized my hands weren't helping I brought them back down in front of my face and saw dark red fluid covering them both.
That was never a good sign.
I tried to roll to the side, tried to get the world back into focus, but it was difficult. I got a grip on the pavement, and pushed upward, but as I did something else pushed me down. Something hard, and concentrated in a single circular area. It was cool against my back and felt almost nice since my entire body had escalated a couple degrees Fahrenheit and it felt like my skin was nearly boiling off.
"Stand."
I turned my head to the left, and my vision was blurry for a second before I could make out the shape of a face. But closer to me than the face was a black gun, pressing into my skin.
I finally understood the threat.
I pushed my hands into the pavement and barely was able to stand up on the road. Pepper was no longer visible and I severely hoped she'd managed to get away from these people who apparently wanted to take me wherever they had planned.
But why were they taking me anyway? Why not just kill me? That's what they'd done to the other person who'd been shot and it seemed that that had been their goal by detonating a bomb next to me and Pepper.
If they were planning on taking me prisoner, it meant something really bad.
But then a black piece of fabric fell down in front of my eyes, and the world faded to black.
________________________________________
When I was finally able to see again, I was in a dark room, with a single light fixture hanging directly above my head.
I leaned my neck back, my entire body feeling sore from the explosion. I tried to move my legs, but they were tied down. My wrists were tied also, the rope digging into my forearms and wrapped around the metal chair I was sitting in. The chair itself was obviously dirty from just glancing at the two arms, with splotches of black in random intervals that made me exceedingly nervous.
Right in front of me stood a woman, arms crossed, staring down at me. She had dark tan skin and moldy green eyes, with long black hair reaching down to her waist. Except her hair was tied back in a tight braid and pulled over her right shoulder. Her entire faced looked ghoulish in how the light fixture shined down from behind her, deepening the dark circles underneath her eyes and the other shadows across her face.
Her arms were crossed as she stared at me for a moment.
"Hello, Nova."
I straightened up in my chair, forcing myself to bring my head up from where I'd been resting it on the back of the chair. How did she already know my name? The only way she could know would be if someone had told her and I immediately thought of Pepper. What if Pepper had also been caught and that's how she knew my name? I shuddered at the thought of Pepper being forced into telling anyone anything and wondered if she was in the same position as I now was, except in a neighboring room.
"I have a couple questions for you. I'd highly appreciate it if you would respond without hesitation, since that would make things much easier for the both of us." She began to pace in front of my chair, staying in my line of sight the entire time and not taking her eyes off of me.
I didn't say anything in response.
I didn't have anything to say.
"Please, tell me exactly why you did what you did." The woman was staring at me harshly, watching for a response.
But I was confused. What I did? What was that supposed to mean? I'd done a lot of things in my life. But even as I told myself that my mind was shuffling through memories and sticking to only one thing that the woman could possibly be referring to.
That was impossible. She couldn't know about what I was focusing on. Not even my Animus could show my memories. Obviously she couldn't actually know about what had happened.
Yet she was still staring at me like she knew something. Like she knew my exact thought process and knew the truth about me.
The thought scared me.
"I-I don't know what you're talking about," I muttered and my voice came out as a croak.
"Yes, you do." The woman leaned forward, and placed her palms on the armrests of my chair, her nose only centimeters away from mine. "You know exactly what I'm talking about." Her green eyes stared deeply into mine, and seeing them made me even more certain that she'd somehow figured it out. She knew. She had to know.
"No...I...."
"I asked for an answer." The lady was backing up now, and the light from the light fixture above hit her face, exaggerating every line of it.
"I-..." I didn't know what to say.
The lady began to reach into her jacket, and I stared, not sure how to react. Her hand came out with a gun, that glinted white underneath the light. She slowly pulled it out of her jacket, then turned its entrance towards me. Pointing the shiny black barrel straight at my chest, she whispered threateningly, "You have five seconds."
I opened my mouth, frantically searching for something to say. There had to be something I could say. Anything. But there wasn't anything that came to mind. How was I supposed to answer her question? Why did I do it? I still wasn't even sure I knew what she was talking about, but wouldn't speaking the one answer I had be a better idea then getting shot for not saying it.
I had to tell her. I had to say it.
"I-I d-," I began, but was cut off by a loud bang. It took me a second to realize it had come from her gun, and it took me another couple seconds to look down and realize my chest was completely covered in dark red.
Red, like roses and sunsets, and blood. Blood. It was everywhere.
I looked back up towards the woman, and only then realized my vision was diminishing. Black come up around the edges, darkening everything. Right before the darkness consumed me, I saw the woman's face.
And she was smiling.