Caen's Lair

You hurry downstairs to an empty kitchen. You quietly settle on searching the building, and after only two or three minutes Red waves Mess over to the window they’re standing at. They point at a figure dragging someone (hopefully only unconscious) away from the dorm, across campus.

You call 911, report what you’ve seen, and never emotionally recover from the results of the ensuing police investigation.

Resolutely, Red stands up, “Okay, I’ll be back in a sec” - they huff a tense breath - “I hope.” Mess grimaces, but lets them go, and after about two minutes of anxious silence, it hears a muffled scream from downstairs.

Mess arrives in the kitchen but sees nobody, so it creeps around the ground floor quietly, finding further nothing. They must have been in the lobby or right outside then – and indeed, halfway through the lobby it spots a hand on the ground just outside the front door.

Caen whacks it over the head just as it passes through the doorframe and grins, victorious.

Mess and Red sneak downstairs and quietly search the area. They find nothing until they enter the lobby. Steps muffled by the carpeting, they approach the slightly ajar front door, where the moon illuminates a single hand laying just outside the building.

The two exchange a look, and Mess gets closer to examine. As Red watches, someone standing outside takes a swing at its head with a brick, and it crumples in the doorway. Red takes their chance as the attacker is distracted and rushes outside, grabbing for the brick in their hands. They manage to wrestle it from who startlingly turns out to be Caen, and return the favour.

Their angle isn’t quite precise enough to knock her out, but she does slide down the wall whimpering and holding her head. The reality of the situation takes a bit to really sink in, and when it does, they almost faint.

As Caen slowly bends to pick the brick up again, she is interrupted by Tump very emphatically saying, ”What the FUCK.”

“What!?” she replies in the same tone of voice. “I just wanted some cool bones to articulate okay? That’s not a crime.”

“Murder very much is a crime!”

“Oh come on, head wounds always bleed a lot. It's fine!”

As they continue to argue Red sneaks back up the stairs unnoticed and calls the police and an ambulance for Mess. When the emergency services arrive Tump and Caen are still arguing.

“Caen!” shouts Red. “Mess!” shouts Tump. “Calm down, oh my gods, both of you!” shouts Caen.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” shout Red and Tump in unison. A brief silence falls over the room as the three of them stare at each other, then Tump’s eyes grow wide and he hurries up the stairs.

Caen and Red look after him, then Caen drops Mess as Red tackles her and the two scuffle on the ground until the emergency services Tump called arrive and separate the (now also screaming) pair.

Red produces a marble from their pocket and throws it at Caen's head, and before she can confusedly say "ouch", Mess has kicked her legs out from under her and her back hits the tile. The brick clatters to the ground next to her and she curses.

"Never was good at close-range combat…“

Tump, face down on the floor, groans. The 911 operator is very confused at how oddly calm everyone seems to be.

"Caen?" says Red, sounding slightly hysteric, "What the fuck is this?"

"Language!" says Caen.

"Where is Sylvi?" says Mess.

Caen looks a bit nervous at this. "Look... I'm gonna take great care of her bones...?" Another silence falls over the kitchen, broken by Tump groaning from the floor. And that, interestingly, is what does it - in an instant Mess is skidding along the tile grabbing for Caen's arms as she tries to bring the brick down on its head; Red checks for Tump's pulse, and finding one, runs to help Mess.

She whacks both of them with the brick at least once, but not in places that'd really do any damage, and so they manage to fight her down and disarm her pretty quickly. Red sits down on her back holding her arms, and Mess retrieves a phone to call 911.

Tump groans from the floor.

Red dials up Mess and for a while both parties search in silence alongside each other. Then Red hears movement on the other side, shuffling, and then a whisper they can't make out, and finally, a groan of pain accompanied by a wet thumping sound. They freeze as they hear the phone clatter to the ground and be picked up again. Someone softly blows into the receiver and hangs up. Tump, seeing their expression, is very worried, but doesn't get a chance to voice this as Red grabs him by the wrist and pulls him up the stairs back to the room.

Once they can breathe at a normal frequency again, Red recounts what they just heard, and the two decide to call the police.

It takes the police six minutes to get there, and when they search the place they find blood on the path between the main building and the road, and two corpses wrapped in mesh next to four shallow graves in a bit of woodland just off said path.

You decide to call the police and lock yourself upstairs in the room until they arrive. You have to wait quite a bit and as you do, your minds concoct wilder and wilder theories about what could have happened. "Do you think we should have made sure before we called the police? About Mess?" Red asks doubtfully, and the question hangs in the air like a rain cloud waiting to burst.

When the police arrive, they search the whole place, and they find Sylvi and Mess. They are buried in shallow graves in one of the small pieces of woodland just off campus, meters from where people would walk by to get to class.

Their phones are turned off and laying next to a shovel and a small box of unused rubber gloves, and there is a mesh wrapped once around each buried body. There are two more person-sized holes beside them.

You creep outside and walk around campus calling for Mess and Cin. Calling their phones equally yields no results.

After you've been walking in increasingly desperate circles for a while, you hear a noise. Tump takes three steps towards it and startles at the sound of a yelp behind him. He turns just in time to see Caen run a knife through Red's throat.

She lets them collapse to the ground in a heap and steps around them, holding eye contact with Tump. "Now hold still, yeah darling? I wouldn't want to damage your bones."

Mess tells Red to go get the flashlights if they're so bothered by the darkness, and they scowl and head back to the dorm.

Tump and Mess stand around a bit before they turn at a sound on the path behind them.

When Red finds them, the scream dies in their throat at the sight of their killer.

You all trot back to the dorm and return to your search armed with flashlights. You search for almost an entire hour before you decide to cut your losses and get authorities involved.

The next day, the entire campus is systematically searched until a body is recovered: killed via blunt force trauma and buried, wrapped in mesh. Additional tools are recovered, as well as Sylvi's shut off phone.

To your great relief, Mess picks up. It tells you what route it’s taken around campus, and also that it has so far found exactly nothing. You tell it to come back, and begrudgingly it agree. To your even greater relief, Mess returns to you unharmed, and this time when it calls 911, though the operator sounds very annoyed, you are believed.

You sit in silence in the locked room, waiting, and then you keep sitting there in silence with the door open until someone with a grave face tells you they've just dug up a corpse.

You grab your phones and two flashlights and head out to search for your two missing friends.

You call their names, but don't get any response. The only clue you find is a bit of blood on the path across from the math building, and it moves you to try the police again. This time they take you seriously, and the operator tells you to go back inside and wait there.

All the waiting is kind of driving you to insanity at this point, but you do it anyway. You lock the doors and curl up on the couch, pretending you're not both intently listening for... footsteps? Screams? Anything.

It takes the police another eleven minutes and twenty-nine seconds to get there; you know that exactly because both of you stare at your phones the entire time, pressing the power button, reading the time over and over again until the screen goes black, pressing the power button, and so on.

Together you walk around campus for half an hour, screaming Sylvi's name and checking the few unpaved stretches of dirt for footsteps. You come up empty and decide that tomorrow, you will call every single person she knows whose number you have, and if nobody knows where she is, and if they still won’t believe you you'll have to actually, physically go to the nearest police department.

(Needless to say, nobody has seen her)