God-Descending Disk

"I noticed you've been taking notes," Mr. Hutton said. "Tell us what you wrote down."

The original Richard had never voluntarily spoken up in class. He was the kind of invisible student whose name teachers could only remember by checking the roll call.

But this Richard was different now.

He lowered his head and glanced at his notebook.

"I was thinking about that report." He stood up. "The phrase 'recommend ending the investigation' is itself a contradiction."

Mr. Hutton raised his eyebrows slightly. "Go on."

"If the conclusion of the investigation was 'no abnormalities found,' then the proper wording should have been 'investigation complete; no phenomena of concern discovered.'"

"But they didn't write that. They wrote 'end the investigation.' The premise of that phrase is that there was something worth investigating further, but they chose not to continue."

The classroom fell quiet for a moment.

"Excellent analysis, Williams. You may sit down."

As Richard sat, he felt several pairs of eyes on him.

Warren, seated in the back row, was the most surprised.

When had this sickly fellow, usually so quiet and reserved, become so eloquent?

Greenwood's dining hall was a high-ceilinged chamber.

Ventilation ducts ran through the roof. They were supposedly meant to disperse heat, but their effect had always been limited.

Portraits of school trustees and benefactors hung on the walls.

The gentlemen in the paintings looked down from above at the students eating beneath them, as if ready at any moment to critique their table manners.

Richard carried his tray and shuffled forward in line.

Standing beside him was Hugh Fenton, his classmate and one of his few friends in class.

The boy's hair could never stay properly combed. He pushed his bangs to the side with one hand, only for them to fall back two seconds later.

Hugh's circumstances at school were much like Richard's. His father was a postal dispatcher, and his mother taught at a middle school.

His family also treated Greenwood's tuition as a major burden, and in this dining hall, they always stayed in the area meant for people like them.

"Tomato Oxtail Soup today." Hugh leaned closer. "I can smell it. It should be freshly made, not leftovers from yesterday."

"Mm." Richard moved forward a step. "How much per bowl?"

"Five pence."

Richard reached into his pocket and counted his copper coins without saying anything.

He nudged his tray forward, thanked the woman at the counter, took a cup of free hot tea, and slipped away to the side.

Unlimited free hot tea was probably the last shred of generosity Greenwood had left.

Hugh followed behind him, giving an awkward smile. He did not buy any soup either.

The two found a small table by the window and sat down.

Someone was already sitting there. His name was Barrett, another classmate of theirs, and he was chewing his food slowly.

There was almost nothing on his bread, only a thin smear of peanut butter.

When he saw Richard and Hugh approach, he shifted aside without saying a word.

The three of them gathered around the small table, each dealing with their own lunch.

The sounds in the dining hall were layered.

The central area was the liveliest, occupied by the more prominent crowd.

Briston was a small city, after all. There were no real aristocrats, only mostly wealthy merchants or elite families in their second or third generations.

Usually, their grandfathers had built the family fortunes, while their fathers had entered law firms or parliament.

By their generation, they naturally felt as though a wall separated them from those grimy workhorses.

As Richard drank his hot tea, his gaze drifted across the hall.

In a corner by the window, a girl sat alone.

Lillian Hayward.

Richard dug the name out of his memories. She was one of the more outstanding girls in class, both academically and in appearance.

Her features were delicate, her nose narrow and straight. She looked as though she had been carefully sketched in pencil.

Her tray held much the same as Richard's: thin soup, bread, no meat.

Perhaps noticing his gaze, the girl looked up.

When she noticed that Richard's tray contained much the same as hers, something flickered in her eyes.

"Brother, stop staring."

Someone slapped his shoulder hard. Evelyn had appeared at some point, clutching a paper packet in her hand.

"Here, have some butter cookies I made in home economics. I'm dieting lately, so help me finish them."

She stuffed the packet into Richard's hands and ran off without waiting for a response.

Richard opened the packet. Inside were golden-brown cookies with lightly charred edges.

He watched his sister's deer-like figure vanish into the distance.

Dieting? She was skinny as a bamboo pole. What was she dieting for?

After breaking the cookies apart and handing pieces to the two classmates around him, he took one for himself and put it in his mouth.

Crisp, sweet, salty—the butter melted across his tongue.

Hugh held half a cookie in his hand and said softly, "Your sister is so cute."

"Obviously." Richard took a sip of tea.

After the final bell rang, Richard packed his bag at his desk.

Several boys shoved one another as they crowded toward the door, their laughter flowing out like water.

"Williams."

A tall, burly boy stopped beside his desk, with a boy and a girl behind him.

The boy was Mason, who always joined in whenever there was trouble.

The girl was Gray. She had a quiet personality and came from a good family, so she was also part of their little circle.

"Your speech today." Warren braced one hand on the corner of Richard's desk. "To be honest, it was a little unexpected."

"I was just saying whatever came to mind." Richard slipped his notebook into his bag.

"It wasn't just whatever." Warren corrected him. "That old man Hutton doesn't praise people easily in class."

"So?"

"So, you might be interested in what I have next." Warren said.

His tone was polite, but it carried the unspoken assumption that Richard would agree.

"What is it?" Richard picked up his bag and turned toward him.

Warren pulled a cloth pouch from his coat pocket and tossed it lightly in his hand.

He smiled mysteriously.

"A God-Descending Disk. I got it from an old man who bought used goods. They say it came over from the Eastern Continent. The real thing."

Mason cut in from the side with a snicker. "You know, the kind of trick where a table moves around. Pretending to summon spirits for fun."

Richard glanced at the cloth pouch.

In his previous life, this thing had another name: a spirit board. Its principle was the so-called ideomotor effect.

Everyone participating unconsciously exerted force in the same direction, collectively pushing it to move.

They were unaware of it themselves and thought it was an outside force, fooling themselves into believing they had come into contact with something mysterious.

Scientific, rational, explainable. That was the textbook version.

But then he remembered what Mr. Hutton had said that morning: the truly dangerous things were those that appeared inside hats.

At that thought, Richard was already saying, "Not today, I..."

Halfway through his sentence, he suddenly sensed something unusual with the panel.

The cloth pouch was roughly half an arm's length away, casually tossed in Warren's hand.

Within that distance, the number at the edge of his consciousness changed.

[Available Points: 0.1]