The day after Jacob trained perception with Blake's help was the campus festival of lights.
At noon, the faculty halted the spell that ran the illusion around the campus. The sky, the sun, the fake, fluffy clouds, vanished, covering the campus in a black blanket darker than the darkest, moonless night. The floating orbs along the pathways and the golden lights shining through windows in buildings provided the only illumination. It felt like they'd been transported to some forgotten, half-generated digital realm.
Then the lights began. The festival was something that happened every year, on the time-dilation equivalent of the third week of July. It celebrated the end of the Imbalancing, a period during the early nineties that—as far as Jacob could decipher—had been rife with heightened crossovers made worse by the rise in the anti-Order activity of several insurgent groups worldwide, most prominently amongst them the Sons of Dynas.
The two boys who had given the light show after the Play-In games had evidently been practicing for the festival. Upon the blackened canvas of the sky, lights exploded for two hours straight. Sometimes abstract shapes. Other times creatures like sinuous eastern dragons or blazing-maned stallions.
Faculty and sanctioned upper year students put on displays all over campus. Some of them scraped the heights of the pocket dimension, visible campus-wide. Others were just over the tops of the buildings. Some twined between the trees, or galloped across the open commons. It was almost like a little carnival; each pocket of campus offering something different.
The Bourbon gang started out by the dorms with most of the other first-years, but crossed towards separate displays around campus and the town that caught their eyes.
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They talked about what they would make if they learned how to make light-shows, wondered why the faculty didn't have more fun with the illusion surrounding the pocket dimension and change their location or surroundings from time to time, and at the end lay on the grass outside the Vanderbilt Building along with everyone else to see the electric finale put on by Professor Michaelson and President Russell working in tandem.
It was a mix of firework-like explosions and what—when Jacob asked her out of confusion—Camilla said were 'artistic renditions of imbalance.' Blake and Grace held hands and acted weird towards each other the whole time. There must have been a thing between them, but Jacob wasn't really sure and he didn't want to bring it up to Archie or Camilla, who seemed like they were politely ignoring it.
The next day Stephen told everyone in the Harrison 2nd floor lounge he'd used the distraction of the festival to search a couple restricted areas on campus and that he'd thought he'd found a control nexus for the weather system, and that—despite much protest—he was going back that night to see if he could tamper with it. A couple people asked to go with him but he said it was something he had to do by himself, and wouldn't disclose the location.
Tobi Yengue offered to follow Stephen that night, but ended up losing him in the town, which led to an explosion of backers of the 'shell house' theory. Most of them stayed up, waiting to see what would happen, but to everyone's disappointment and unease, he didn't return.
The next day Stephen appeared in class, and they cornered him in the dorm afterward. He looked pale, twitchy, and jumped at the slightest noises. A ghostly, haunted mimicry of himself. Despite almost interrogative prodding from Tobi and Victor about where the nexus was and where he'd been all night, all he would say was that he hadn't found it, had been wrong about its location, and he wasn't going to keep on looking. Needless to say it did nothing to quell the others' curiosity and they went out to the town as a group to search.
Before Jacob could blink, the week had passed in a miasma of training, classes, and long hours spent searching for an answer to the killer's magic.
The Round of 32 was upon them.