It took hours to shift myself out of the strange fugue that followed touching the Veil, but I had a solid goal I had to accomplish, and kept my feet moving even as my mind was mostly fuzzes over. My younger sister attended the school downtown. She would have relied on the trains to take her back home, a nearly 45-minute commute on a train capable of going nearly 200 miles an hour. I had to get to her, and make sure she was ok.

Of course, with the way things were going lately, she'd probably already have an army of angry schoolkids beating the shit out of everyone who came near, solidifying her place as Empress of the Central School, create a dynasty based on overwhelming power, and have a blood cult set up by the time I got there. I loved my sister and she was utterly brilliant, but more than a little weird.

I hate being right sometimes.

Ok, so not totally right, but close. When I got to the junior high complex I was startled by how very empty it seemed. Tens of thousands of youths were taught here from all over the main island, it should have been a madhouse. Instead, the junior high was locked tighter than a miser's bank vault, and the elementary complex was practically abandoned.

Picking my way through the mess of hallways and common areas I came across a door to one of the many cafeterias. Faint sobbing sounds could be heard from inside, and a single older voice spoke soothingly. So I did the polite thing and knocked on the door.

Fun fact;

An increase of 20-30% endurance is not, in fact, exclusively endurance. The human body is an unbelievably complex organism, and to increase stamina by that amount requires strengthening a significant amount of the body's muscle mass, increasing bone strength while keeping the weight the same or lower, and buffing the endocrine system responsible for hormones and chemicals like adrenaline. This results in a 'roughly 20-30% increase in stamina'. In addition, touching the Veil has a now commonly known side effect of amplifying the manipulator's strength unconsciously until they can actually control it. Basically, it wasn't my fault that when I went to knock the door broke off the aging sliding hinges and fell to the floor with an Earth-shattering boom.

Imagine my further surprise as the older girl dealing with over a hundred scared children was my old lab partner, sometimes friend, and solid drinking buddy Astrea, the only adult in a room stuffed with crying kids. Yay.

I'll freely admit I am not the best person alive, children annoy me most of the time, and my social skills are somewhat lacking at the best of times. So when over 100 children charged me like sharks in a blood frenzy, I panicked a little and tried to look as unthreatening as possible. Clearly, this was the right choice, as most of them fled past me and into the hallway.

Astrea and I talked for hours, and I would be lying if I said I remember any of the actual words. It basically amounted to what I expected though, my sister had in fact taken over the junior high and led the teens out to the rail station to start the trek home (fortunately there was no blood-cult when they left, but it was probably just a matter of time). And so it was that after an evening of planning I agreed to help Astrea get the children somewhere safer in the morning, and fell asleep in the slightly strange smelling cafeteria to thoughts of swirling lights, and whirling fire.