Colleen POV dream.
Deerfield Hall looking schoolground with a lot of buildings and a courtyard. Snowing. Something was wrong with the place but couldn't put hands on what.
I was pregnant and the rest of the students were ruthless and unforgiving in their bullying. Dissociating. There was one class being held by the guidance counsellor on the second floor that we were attending. Other students included a woman with a hijab and a popular boy. I clung to my phone and tried to make time pass faster but I was due for a meeting with this guidance counsellor.
I went to the counsel room and when I approached the counsellor she used some sort of magic and the door slammed and locked shut. I whirled around to see an impossibly tall, terrifyingly grotesque gray man who pinched my neck when I tried to run. They cornered me and told me they needed to eat me, and the children inside me, for some sort of power boost. I tried to attack the counsellor to see if I could defend myself and considering she was humanoid, but to no avail. There was a sludgy warping large piece of flesh on the ground that stopped me, and periodically it'd warp out the vague silouette and appearance of a man. Ultimately as the three of them cornered me, the gray man offered me a plastic bag and told me to swallow it and suffocate and die. I asked him why he'd do that instead of just eating me and he laughed something about enjoying watching someone die by their own hand.
Frantically I looked out into the hallway at other students. Some of them looked at me, some of them jeered, some of them looked afraid and kept their heads down. Some of them were demonic silhouettes.
Before I could swallow the bag, suddenly the sludge man sent out what looked like razor daggers from his body. The counsellor and gray man screamed. The counsellor was pinned to the wall with the amount of daggers that hit her. The gray man was recoiling and trying to fend it off. I heard the sludge man bellow Run!
So I scrambled through the legs of the gray man and out the ruined door. Outside shadowy demons looking vaguely like classmates tried to grab me but I sprinted down the hall and sidestepped their arms. I swiped on my phone and suddenly rectangles of space would open up between walls, allowing me through. Behind me I could hear the roar of things chasing me as the walls closed.
At some point I reached the end of the building and a piece of the sludge man rounded the hall. He yelled that I had to open two walls, one in this building, one in the other, and get ready to jump.
I did that, soaring through the space between the two buildings with snow slapping my face, and skidded into a storage room cloaked in velvety quiet. The room looked like a huge warehouse with high windows and wan blue light. I struggled to my feet, holding my aching belly. I was terrified and feeling so alone, but then I calmed, feeling Lalein nearby.
I opened another wall into what looked like a beautiful library room with a fireplace, a wall full of books, another wall with bright windows that for some reason showed a vague silhouette of spring outside, and some tall chairs. Before I walked in there, a portal opened up in the storage room much like the ones I'd open. Lalein flowed through in his dark cloak, his face sympathetic and soft.
He guided me to the library room and the portal closed behind us. As he sat in the chair he transformed... Into the woman with the hijab, the classmate who was with me earlier. It turns out he was in disguise the whole time monitoring the situation with the demons in the school. I sat with him and he held my hands, boring into my eyes. We didn't say a word, only with myself knowing that it wasn't quite over because I still had to go back to that school regardless of the dangers there. But it felt good knowing there was a safe spot like this to hide.
Eventually I peeled myself from his side and descended some stairs to exit out to the snowy courtyard. There was a glass room in the center of the courtyard, what looked kind of like a phone booth but without a phone. We had to go there to "save" our progress. I walked up to it, inputted a code 4953, and made my way back to the original building.
When we went inside, we switched. It's now Sophia's Pov.
I made my way through the snowy courtyard back to Deerfield. Between some of the metal beam sculptures leading to the entryway was the gray man, immobile and staring at me.
I walked in warily to the school and was almost immediately greeted by the vice principal, who demanded a reason for my truancy. I stuttered something about dissociating and not remembering. I didn't want this human woman to know about the demons prowling about for her own safety. She began on this intense criticism of me and my choices, including the pregnancy. At some point I snapped and threw my phone at her, but I missed and the phone clattered some feet away. I immediately regretted it as I picked it up and there was a thin crack across the bottom of the screen. I knew I wouldn't be able to open portals now that it was broken.
The vice principal seemed to recognize I was at a breaking point so she calmed down. She told me to get to class and I went to the escalator to go back up once again to the classroom where I'd take lessons from the guidance counsellor. However, since the counsellor was dead, lots of students were gathered around out loud wondering why she was nearly forty five minutes late. Some students looked accusingly at me but for some reason the popular boy took the blame. He then pulled me aside and asked me with his big black eyes full of worry if I needed to go home with him tonight to somewhere safe. I realized he could see demons too and he must've been trying to protect me. He asked me if I saw the gray man around and I said yes, but he wasn't attacking me anymore. The boy seemed relieved and told me again to go home with him.
I asked him if he wasn't afraid to be seen with me and I realized his repeated asking for me to go home with him was some sort of proposal. He told me how he didn't mind and would even pretend to be the father of my children. He said he saw the day I got pregnant and I got a rush of memories being ravaged by demons and shuddered with both revelation and a dick twisted pleasure. He said he felt like he couldn't stop them, no one could, but at least he could do something right by me. I told him I'd think about it.
Since there was no class to be had I went downstairs to the center common area of the building that you could see from all the floors. There was a music station set up with a cherry bass and really nice boppy song playing. I somehow registered this as Simon's instrument and I tried to improvise on the bass to add to the song but... Quickly remembered I dunno how to play, LMAO. So I wandered to my harp in the corner only to realize someone had untuned and loosened all the strings. In my incredulity I watched as a demonic man leapt for Simon's bass with wire cutters and snipped one of the strings. Furious I went back and pommeled the demon man. The other students and demons watched warily but didn't intervene.
It occurred to me so much had happened between our last save point and now that I had to go back out. I went to the snowy booth again but before I could input the pin, two dark and dangerous women seeped out from the shades and laughed maniacally that finally they could get a good meal. I turned on my heel and tried to sprint back to the building but it felt like there was so much snow that I could barely move.
Then, I woke up.
