Cjr09 and Startedraining

[Startedraining]

"You were also tricked into helping open the gate?" Elliot sighed, "That's probably where we know each other from. Well, none the less, my name is Elliot!" He offered his hand to her in greeting.

"I don't suppose we could share that book?"

[cjr09]

"Caitlin," she greets, taking his hand and shaking it firmly.

"Be my guest, I could use more than one opinion on these things," she says, and Evangelos caws in offence. "Not that your opinion isn't valued, Evangelos," she says, and the young crow ruffles his feathers angrily at her.

"Did you join the Crows, at the end of it all?" She asks, genuinely curious. She knew most of them had, but she'd met a few who hadn't- she couldn't entirely say she didn't know why they hadn't, but she felt that this was her best shot at atoning for her actions.

Plus her crow had been an awesome bonus.

[Startedraining]

"I did, but my egg... has not hatched yet," Elliot admitted, "I'm not sure it is alive, frankly. It didn't seem all that warm even when I was holding it."

He shrugged as if to play it off, "But I digress, we should get reading, eh?"

[cjr09]

"Yeah, Evangelos was an early starter. These guys seem to grow fast, though- I think he'll be full size in no time. Have a little faith in your soul- you've made it this far, yeah?" She says, plucking her as-of-yet flightless friend off of the shelf he was on and she can see the flickerings of her red soul in his eyes.

She wonders what having a soul the color of Oblivion's eyes could mean.

"Yeah, best get to it. I've staked my claim on a desk towards the back; best get going before someone decides to take it."

[Startedraining]

"That would indeed be helpful, but if necessary we can camp out on the ground." Elliot motioned for her to lead the way, "Answers must be found, regardless of the way we get to them, be it the floor or the table."

He thought about his egg, safely kept in his home under a heat lamp. The shell was cold, did the crow not make it?

[cjr09]

Caitlin makes a non-commental humming noise, returning her attention to the book in her hands.

It might not have all of the answers, but it might have some of them.

She leads Elliot back to the desk she was talking about, nicking a second chair from another table and gesturing for him to sit, laying the book flat on the desk, searching for an author- but the book shows nothing but it's title.

"Shall we?"

[Startedraining]

Elliot nodded, "Of course. Who wrote this book?" he asked.

He scanned the library for signs of people creeping up on them, but everyone seemed to be busy with their own studies. It relaxed him to know that they were not being eavesdropped on.

[cjr09]

"Can't tell, no author on the cover," she says, carefully opening the book- the spine was stiff and the binding protests the treatment, it clearly hadn't been read much, if at all.

She cautiously flips through the first few pages, looking for a title page with an author on it, but there's nothing.

The next page yields a map- all of Eldemore, with a darkness spreading across it.

"I guess that's what's happening right now," she mutters, thumbing over the drawn darkness.

[Startedraining]

Elliot frowned. "That's a bad representation of it. It's more like..." he searched for the words, "Instead of some impending darkness, if you've been in places that are surrounded by this darkness, it wears you down. I stayed in the Ashmoors a while, trying to find everything out, but after a while it was like it was hard to breathe." He motioned to those dark lines, "inside of those places."

[cjr09]

Lyric honestly hadn't been looking for trouble this time.

Honestly.

But they were asking for it that time- who goes and picks on defenseless kittens, anyway?- and that's how Lyric finds himself running from a group of bullies, a tiny kitten cradled carefully in his hands.

He wished he could say this was a first.

Seriously, if he had to skip out on Essie because he got detention for fighting again she might actually kill him, and he liked living.

"You can't possibly like living that much if you pick fights with literally everything, Lyr," Tetra's voice sounds in the back of his head, and really, imagined-Tetra had no reason to talk.

He might've knocked his head jumping a set of stairs somewhere if this is what he thought of when he was running for his life.

The school comes into sight and he narrows his sights on a bigger, tougher looking kid nearby, and he skids to a stop in front of him, "Hi hold my cat for a second I have to beat some people."