The Haunting at Kravis School of Fine Arts

Justin steps into the center of the rings, careful not to knock over any of the candles. He spins slowly, taking in the mirrors as he goes. Some don’t return a reflection from the distance he is standing at, and so he gets that bit closer.

"Freaky! Take a look at this!…"

There’s a moment of silence as he inspects himself.

"Im huge!" he laughs, before moving on. He looks into the next, and he lets out a sharp breathy sound of surprise.

"What the fuuuuuuck…" he wonders; as he steps closer to the mirror. The man pulls at his own face to make sure it’s really his own he is seeing.

He gets right up close to his reflection. He pulls one eyelid up and inspects the red underneath. It’s him alright; only his face is contorted in a leering, demented grin, his eyes reflected menacingly back at himself.

He turns back to the rest of you.

"Guys! Come take a look at this!" he says. You look over, and notice that the reflection isn’t turned back to some mirror crew in a mirrored room. Instead, there are two Justin’s staring at you! One, innocent and idiotic. The other, leering menacingly from behind the glass.

But only for a moment.

Professor takes one look at the scene in the attic and absolutely refuses to step a foot further than a meter from the entrance. He can deal with faulty piping causing rusted water and weird sounds coming from old buildings, but candles and mirrors arranged in such an obviously fabricated way mean human interference - and he has seen way too many freshman pranks to know better than to approach.

"Ricky, I'm having you wash you hands with medical alcohol before we go back into the car," he grumbles half-heartedly at his colleague, since apparently no one on this crew knows not to touch unknown substances with bare skin. Honestly, it's a wonder these people are still alive. "It's probably just grease, or result of these candles being lit at some point. Can't expect this place to have good ventilation..."

Narcissus pauses and frowns at the mirrors where Justin is being an A-grade clown. He blinks, as if unsure about what he is seeing, and then frowns. "And these mirrors are probably theatre props. Seeing how they... distort things." Professor coughs and clears his throat. "Can you maybe hurry up with your narration? This floor sounds like it's been rotting for decades, and I'm not looking forward to it caving in under us." Not to mention that this place gives him the creeps. But he'd never admit it, because he won't ever hear the end of it otherwise.

Leigh feels a shiver run down her spine when she sees the evil Justin in the mirror. She tries to hide her reaction, but she does take a step back towards the entrance where she bumps into the professor. "Careful where you're going," she complains absent-mindedly as she stops filming and instead goes back through the footage on her camera, trying to confirm the obvious truth that what she just saw was just a trick her eyes played on her. Of course, mirror images don't suddenly start moving - or not moving - independently.

Finally Ricky shrugs, not an expert in foreign substances, and wipes it on the wall. He turns just in time to see Justin's mirror shenanigans. "Wow, Mike, where did you get these? A circus? These are funhouse mirrors!" He laughs and shakes his head at the juxtaposition. Then Justin turns but his mirror image does not and Ricky's laugh gets caught in his throat. He stops breathing in surprise. Finally he takes a shaking breath and whispers to Leigh out of the side of his mouth, "Are you seeing this?"

Leigh, too surprised by the whole mirror event to even be creeped out by Ricky standing next to her, tilts her camera a bit to let him also check the footage with her.

Ricky inspects the camera, too weirded out to take more than two or three glances at Leigh's chest.

Narcissus automatically raises his free hand to support Leigh, though he promptly scoffs right after at her comment. "Not going anywhere. And whatever you two are seeing is just an optical illusion," he squints at the footage for a second. "Or perhaps a shared hallucination, if you will. Either way, we should finish here quickly, I'm way overdue for my smoke break."

Wordlessly and without looking up from the footage, Leigh reaches into her pocket and pulls out another piece of nicotine gum, offering it to Narcissus.

Joe poo-poo'ed the Professor and Leigh hovering near the doorway as he fixed his hair in the mirror. Leaning in towards his reflection, he noticed how quite browner his hair was, fuller too, and pulled back to admire the more youthful reflection. Pulling back, Joe watched the youthful reflection rapidly age into senescence, eliciting a horrified shriek from Joe and causing him to comically throw his back across the mirror to hide the decrepit reflection. Funhouse mirrors? There's no fun these mirrors...

Narcissus takes the gum from Leigh, but his frown doesn't disappear and instead morphs from displeasure to concern as he surveys his colleagues. Now, he wouldn't be too put off by Justin's antics or Ricky claiming that he's seeing spirits, but Leigh is usually less inclined to such emotional outbursts, and Joe seemed at least somewhat composed in the beginning. The shared stress must be getting to all of them.

"Glickmann, are you alright?" He raises his eyebrow as he watches the man throw himself at the mirror, carefully avoiding to look at the reflections himself. "Mike, I don't know what the hell is going on here, but we really should wrap this up. No one is going to believe that this isn't a set-up anyway." Professor frowns at the gum in his hand, as if it's responsible for what's going on around them. "Just snap a few shots, we can do a voiceover later."

Having not scene his own reflection fail to turn, J-Money continues:

"What do you mean? These things are rad!"

He moves to the next, and the next; pointing and laughing at himself in the mirror.

"This has to be some VR shit!" he posits, despite not wearing anything close to a headset!

He turns to face the camera, and lines himself up in the shot.

"WHAT’S UP, FOLKS? WE’RE BACK AT THE KRAVIS…" he stops up short for a second, as his eye flit to the mirror just beyond the camera, behind the rest of the crew. His face goes pale.

"… School of… Art." he says, seemingly starting to sweat, struggling to remember where he is. His eyes go beyond the group again, which draws your gaze that way.

You look, and see another reflection of J-Money. It’s staring at the man, but it’s no reflection of him. It cocks its head, as if sizing up the man, this way and that.

With a sudden rapid motion, it raises one hand to its mouth, and then the other. Its mouth hangs open, as it starts to fit its fingers into its own mouth. It lets them sit there a moment, still cocking its head at Justin.

Suddenly, it wrenches down on its own jaw, ripping and tearing. You hear a scream from Justin in the center of the room, and look to see the young man’s jaw ripped open and wide. The mirror wrenches down again, and you hear a sickening break behind you. Now the screams are more guttural, animal as the man claws uselessly at his ruined mouth.

You look back at the mirror, it’s jaw hanging on my a thread, it’s tongue lolling about uselessly. And it leers at you. The rest of its face creases into a smile, but the mouth doesn’t have the ability to anymore.

It grabs the dangling flap of skin and bone hanging off the bottom if it’s face in both hands, and rips the thing free in a feat of perverse strength.

Justin is gargling madly behind you, his own jaw mirroring that action. He clutches at his throat, wet with blood pouring from the wound. His eyes are mad and pleading. All for nothing, as the man flops to the floor a moment later. Blood continues to pour from the wound in the lower half of his face.

Behind you, the mirror ghost watches its work come to completion, and then takes a deliberate step forward, into this realm, this space, this room.

Leigh's eyes are forced up from the camera as the gruesome scene unfolds. Her face goes white as her eyes are locked on Justin's jaw slowly and painfully dislocating and tearing free from his face while the mirror image mutilates itself. She backs off, hugging her camera tight to her chest as if for comfort, and once again bumps right into the professor. This time, she doesn't move away, however, but leans into him before muttering, "This is real." She's shaking as her brain is still struggling to accept the realiy that there really is some kind of ghost here, and that it just murdered Justin right in front of them. "We need to get out of here," she declares, still hugging the camera.

Professor, paler than a sheet of paper, stares at the scene in horror for a few seconds before forcing himself to focus. Whatever is happening, it is clear that they are in danger, and the only thing coursing through his mind now is that he is the most responsible of the group and should take charge. It is easier said than done, and one look at Justin collapsed on the floor makes him dizzy - but Narcissus is supposed to be an unofficial team doctor, and no stupid ghost is going to scare him from doing just that. Even if he entertains for a moment that the ghostly figure is real, then there is no way that he's letting it intimidate him.

His mind made up, Professor raises his hand to support Leigh before stepping away from her and taking a step towards the mirrors - and the ghostly figure he is doing his best at ignoring. "Leigh, Ricky, get out of the attic," Narcissus tries to sound calm, albeit with only moderate success, and quickly makes his way to the center of the room. "Joe, move away from the mirror and let Mike know what just happened."

He pauses before the circle of candles, but then scowls at his own hesitation and steps over them to squat besides Justin - carefully avoiding even glancing at the mirrors around or at the alleged ghost still hovering a few steps away. But one look at Justin's state is enough for Professor to conclude that even if he is still alive, there is no chance that they would be able to stop him from bleeding out with a wound like this. So instead, Narcissus reaches for the discarded camera, now splattered with blood, but probably still recording.

Ricky looks away as the carnage unfolds, which almost makes it worse. He can hear the cracking, tearing, gurgling and screaming still and covers his ears as well as his eyes. When it seems quiet he looks again and sees another Justin standing directly in front of the mirror. Did it...come out of the mirror? He doesn't need to hear the Professor's suggestion but quickly grabs Leigh by the bicep and drags her towards the exit behind them.

* What the fuck? What the fuck?
What the fuck… is happening
in there people? *

---

One of Justin’s eyes rolls up to look at the Professor, as the man checks him over. Is it pleading you see? Regret? Maybe recognition, of you and the situation the man is now in? A second later, it’s glassy and distant.

Gone…

The ghostly figure flickers, as if a channel was being flipped on an old TV. It’s Justin, then Leigh, Ricky, the Professor and then Glickmann. It flitters again, and then it’s a small woman - Alice, you suppose.

Leigh doesn't resist Ricky. She let's him pull her along. Anything to get away...

Professor's hand shakes, but he still manages to get ahold of the camera before hastily backing away from the figure, almost tripping in the process. "Joe! Start moving!" He pauses just on the edge of the candle circle, barely holding his nerves together to wait for Glickmann. The moment the actor moves, Narcissus is absolutely booking it right after.

Already looking for away to escape the increasingly mad situation, Joe didn't hesitate at the Professor's suggested course of action. The more distance he put between himself and the jawless J-Money, now the spectrum avatar of Alice, the better. His patent leather shoes took him two steps towards the exit before he turned and kicked over the mirror that he'd saw his own spectral image in before stumbling past the Professor on the way to the exit. Joe's hand grabbed the man's elbow to pull him along towards the exit as his ungainly, yet effective, running gait covered the space between the mirrors and the door in as few steps as Joe could manage.

Ricky being the smartest one in the room (at least in terms of survival), he will clearly be the safest one and make it out of the room in one piece!