"I see you've been taking notes," Mr. Hutton said. "Tell us what you've written."
The old Richard had never volunteered to speak in class. He was a ghost, the sort of student teachers only remembered when consulting the roll call.
But this Richard was different.
He looked down at his notebook.
"I was thinking about that report," he said, standing up.
"The phrase 'recommend halting the investigation' is a contradiction in itself."
Mr. Hutton raised his eyebrows slightly. "Go on."
"If their conclusion was that no anomalies existed, the standard phrasing would be, 'Investigation complete. No noteworthy phenomena discovered.'"
"But they didn't write that. They wrote, 'Halt the investigation.'"
"That phrasing implies there is still something left to uncover, but they made a choice to stop."A brief silence fell over the classroom.
"An excellent analysis, Williams. Sit down."
As Richard sat back down, he felt several pairs of eyes on him.
Warren, sitting in the back row, looked the most surprised.
When did this chronically ill, quiet kid learn to speak with such confidence?
..................
Greenwood's dining hall was a grand room with vaulted ceilings.
Exhaust pipes punched through the roof—supposedly for ventilation, though they never did much good.
Portraits of school trustees and donors lined the walls.
The painted gentlemen stared down from on high at the dining students, looking as if they might critique their table manners at any moment.
Richard held his tray, shuffling forward in the serving line.
Standing beside him was Hugh Fenton, a classmate and one of his few real friends at school.
The boy had hair that refused to lie flat. He swept his bangs aside with a hand, only for them to flop right back down two seconds later.
Hugh's social standing at school mirrored Richard's. His father worked as a postal dispatcher, and his mother was a secondary school teacher.
His family also had to scrape together everything they had to afford Greenwood's tuition fees. Consequently, he always stuck to his unspoken designated zone in the dining hall.
"They have tomato oxtail soup today," Hugh said, leaning in closer.
"I can smell it. Pretty sure they made it fresh today; it's not yesterday's leftovers."
"Yeah," Richard said, shuffling forward a step. "How much a bowl?"
"Five pence."
Richard reached into his pocket and silently counted his copper coins. He said nothing.
Sliding his tray forward, he offered a polite "thank you" to the lunch lady, took a cup of the free hot tea, and stepped aside.
The free hot tea was bottomless—one of Greenwood's few remaining acts of generosity.
Hugh followed right behind him with an awkward smile, opting out of spending his own money on the soup.
The two boys found a small table by the window and sat down.
Another student was already seated there—Barrett, a classmate of theirs. He was methodically chewing his food.
His bread was essentially bare, save for a meager smear of peanut butter.
Seeing Richard and Hugh approach, he shifted slightly to make room, saying nothing.
The three huddled around the small table, silently tackling their lunches.
The noise in the dining hall was strictly segregated by class.
The central area was the loudest, occupied by the school's most prominent figures.
Briston was a small city, after all, bereft of true nobility. It was mostly populated by the second or third generations of wealthy merchant and elite families.
Their grandfathers had usually built the family fortune, paving the way for their fathers to enter law firms or Parliament.
By the time it trickled down to their generation, they naturally felt a thick wall separated them from the grimy working-class cattle around them.
Taking a sip of his hot tea, Richard cast a casual glance across the hall.
Tucked in a corner by the window, a girl sat alone.
Lillian Hayward.
Richard dug the name out of his memories. She was a girl in their class whose grades and looks both stood out.
She had delicate, pale features and a slender, straight nose. Her entire appearance felt as though it had been meticulously sketched with a fine-tipped pencil.
The tray in front of her looked remarkably like Richard's: thin soup, bread, and absolutely no meat.
As if sensing his gaze, the girl raised her head.
Her eyes flickered slightly as she registered the similarly meager contents of Richard's tray.
"Stop staring, brother."
A hand smacked down hard on his shoulder. Evelyn had slipped up on him without him noticing.
She clutched a small paper parcel in her hands.
"Here. I brought you some butter cookies I made in home economics. I'm on a diet right now, so do me a favor and finish them off."
She shoved the parcel into Richard's hands and bolted away without looking back, giving him no chance to reply.
Richard opened the wrapping. The cookies inside were baked a perfect golden brown with slightly crisped edges.
He watched his younger sister's retreating back as she dashed off like a startled fawn.
'A diet? You're as skinny as a beanpole. What is there to lose?'
He broke one of the cookies, offering pieces to his two companions, before popping a piece into his own mouth.
Crisp, sweet, and a little salty. The rich taste of butter melted across his tongue.
Hugh held his half-cookie gently in his hand. "Your sister is so sweet," he murmured.
"Obviously," Richard said, taking another sip of tea.
..................
After the final bell rang, Richard stayed at his desk to pack his bag.
A group of boys jostled each other toward the door, their laughter and shouting spilling out of the classroom like water.
"Williams."
A tall, muscular boy stopped by his desk, flanked by a boy and a girl.
The boy was Mason, someone who eagerly joined in on any commotion.
The girl was Grey. She was quiet and came from a well-off family, which earned her a spot in their little clique.
"Your little speech today," Warren said, leaning a hand on the corner of Richard's desk. "Honestly? Completely unexpected."
"I was just talking," Richard said, shoving his notebook into his bag.
"No you weren't," Warren corrected him. "Old man Hutton doesn't hand out praise in class easily."
"And?"
"And so, you might be interested in what I have next," Warren said.
His tone was polite, but carried an arrogant assumption that Richard would inevitably agree.
"What is it?" Richard asked, hoisting his bag and turning to face him.
Warren dug a Cloth Bag out of his coat pocket and tossed it lightly in his hand.
He smiled mysteriously.
"A Spirit Board. I scored it off an old junk peddler. Supposedly, it's a genuine antique smuggled over from the East Land."
Mason chimed in with a snicker.
"It's that parlor trick where the table moves. You know, pretending to talk to ghosts to spook yourself."
Richard glanced at the Cloth Bag.
In his previous life, this sort of thing had a specific name: Ouija. Its operating principle was the so-called "ideomotor effect."
The participants would unconsciously exert force in the same direction, unwittingly working together to push the planchette around.
Completely unaware of their own actions, they would mistake it for an external force and convince themselves they had made contact with the supernatural.
Scientific, rational, and completely explainable. That was the textbook version.
But then he recalled Mr. Hutton's words from that morning: The truly dangerous things are the things that appear out of hats.
With that in mind, the words "I don't think I can today..." were already on the tip of Richard's tongue.
Halfway through his rejection, he suddenly felt a stir from his interface panel.
The Cloth Bag was only about half an arm's length away, tossing lazily in Warren's hand.
Just within that distance, the number at the edge of his consciousness flickered and shifted.
[Available Points: 0.1]