Mo always told Jack not to judge people by appearances. “It’s mean, just, y’know. Think about it. What do you see when you look at me?”

Jack adjusted his hat. “I see five to ten years in the slammer waiting to happen.”

His quip was rewarded by a hard punch to the left arm. “Ha ha. Well, I ain’t getting a straight response from you any time soon, so I’ll turn this little discussion into a lecture.”

“You’re mighty good at doing that Mo.”

“Shush. Anywho, sure, if ya see someone who looks a bit off, you might be tempted to jump to some conclusions. A guy with a scar, for example, might be a fella y’all want to avoid.” Mo reclined on the edge of Jack’s bed. “But, I haveta say, imagine this. What if that fella, a fella with a scar on his face, what if he got his little scar by selling ice-cream or something?”

Mo’s hypothethis was answered by raucous laughter from Jack.

“Oh, I see, the guy with a scar on his face was really just a friendly old ice cream man. That ice cream industry, it’s really a bitch ain’t it?”

“I admit, my analogy is a bit of a hyperbole..”

“Hyperwhat?”

“Hyperbole, if I know what it means then you certainly should, ya big lug.” Mo took in a deep breath. “Anyways, hyperbole or not, don’t jump to conclusions. People take a look at you, they might think you’re an anti-social brute…”

“What if I want people to see me as an anti-social brute?”, Jack asked.

Mo had to suppress a giggle. “Drop the big brooding act, I know you as well as I know myself. You’re a bit cranky, sure, but people going out of their way to avoid you would annoy you. If some guy...”

“I don’t swing that way Mo.”, Jack grunted.

“You’re a goddamn pervert, Jack. What I meant is that if some random… person, I’ll say person, keep it vague for ya, if some person avoided you based on how you looked it would...”

“Mean absolutely nothing to me?”

“-hurt your ego, more like. Mostly every person, sheltered or not, only can get a good gauge of who they are by the perceptions of others. One perception, well, it’s just not enough, ya know? So sure, it may be annoying to try and talk with someone ya don’t like, to dig down a bit more than your initial perception, but if ya wanna get to the nitty gritty, the core of a person, well, the superficial just ain’t enough.”

“You’re using big words again Mo.” Jack commented.

“You’re a gentleman, right?" Mo asked, throwing her hands up. "A gentleman should have a well balanced vocabulary…”

“Last I checked gentlemen don’t get driven around by teenage girls.”

“Oh all the contrary, only the most refined gentlemen do that.”

Jack chuckled. “Alright Mo, fine. If someone rubs me the wrong way, I’ll be a bit more lenient than normal. But this doesn’t apply to the fop, got it?”

Mo played around with a piece of her hair. “Knew you’d see it my way Jack. Ya always do, in the end.”

That little exchange was two weeks ago, and now, in the golf cart being driven by Officer Port-, er, Officer Feinstein, Jack begrudgingly tried to strike up a conversation. “So, uh, why did ya decide to work here?”

“Oh the pay’s well… and it’s pretty uneventful here.. w-w-well, least it was.”, the Officer answered, nervously.

Jack awkwardly scratched his back. It was obvious that even with Mo’s advice in mind, that the officer before him just wasn’t a particularly complex fellow. Still, Jack felt a bit of a common ground with the man all the same. A bit of peace and quiet, with a decent living wage, those things were not ambitions Jack scoffed at. Travis, who was behind Officer Feinstein and Jack, killed the breezy mood with his foppish questions (as he usually was prone to doing.) “Well anyways Officer, mind if I ask where we’re heading?”

The short man wiped a bit of sweat off his forehead. “Oh, no problem Agent, er, Agent…”

“Davis, call me Agent Davis.”, the fop said, causing Jack to groan.

“Well anyways Agent Davis, we’re at the main quad right now.", the short man explained. " It’s where the upperclassmen dorm and also where half of the classes here at Bensen are. Right now we’re heading over to the north campus. That’s the freshmen halls, and the old man told me to bring y’all there.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “Hey, what’s that big building on the right?” He pointed at a large building, seven stories high or so. Like everything else at Bensen, the exterior was covered by red bricks, and the tell tale white roof was there. However, there were large glass windows spanning nearly the whole vertical stretch of the two visible sides of the building, and through squinting his eyes Jack could see about five bridges connecting platforms at different elevations inside the tall construction.

“Oh, that’s the library.", the Officer explained. " We got that built about seven years ago. It’s tall as heck, ain’t it?”

Travis perked up a bit. “A library? Agent Harigand, we might just have to check that out later.”

Jack exhaled loudly. “What you do on your lonesome is no concern of mine, Davis.” The golfcart proceeded past the tall building, into a wooded trail.

Travis adjusted his glasses.

“Hey, if I might ask, where are we right now?”

The driver, (who Jack reckoned probably felt more like a host of twenty questions at this point), did his best to explain.

“This here is our nature trail. It leads through the woods, and past this upcoming clearing it’s a straight path to the freshman dorms.” The little transport speeded along, and the clearing Officer Feinstein had mentioned came into view. It was pretty spacious, but there was a collection of benches scattered about, probably for some students to rest on during their jogs. Finally, after leaving the clearing and spending five minutes driving through the north end of the trail, the party of three reached the freshmen halls. Travis adjusted his tie while Jack rubbed his left bicep.

The glorified security guard cleared his throat. “Well, Agent Harigand, Agent Davis, here we are. Porter Hall and North Campus.” The area they had come upon was about the size of four football fields arranged in a square. Decorated by magnolia trees and covered with green grass, it was as nice of an area as any in Bensen. There were four buildings arranged neatly, each assigned to its own quadrant. Jack had heard earlier that the buildings on the northern campus was supposed to be really nice, but much like everything at the University, it was nearly impossible to tell how nice the buildings were on the inside solely by the exterior’s design.

“Oh wow, red bricks. There’s a shock.”

For the first time, the portly officer laughed. “Hahaha, true Agent Harigand, our brickmaker ain’t gonna go out of business anytime soon. But I assure you, the residence halls here are nicer than what you’d see at most hotels. And the bedrooms, well, they’re just great. Even if you searched the campus all night you’d get plenty of beauty sleep from staying in one of these dorms.”

Travis shrugged his shoulders. “Well, we didn’t come here to get our beauty sleep, as much as I’d like to. Mind telling us where your boss is?”

The voluminous guard stopped chatting. “Ah, my mistake. Just thought Agent gray hair over here might have wanted to hear about what we have to offer. Officer Tracy is in Porter Hall, the building right behind the one we’re closest too. Walk straight past this one here and you’ll be able to see it quite clearly. Oh, and don’t make a fuss, I was just kidding bout the hair, looks fine to me, honest.”

Jack tried his very best to suppress his seething rage and put on a smile. “Ah no worries bout that, Officer."

Jack got out of the golfcart and headed towards Porter Hall, in a somewhat hurried manner. He didn’t turn back to see if Travis was following him. One thing Jack noticed was the odd lack of any freshmen in the so called freshmen campus. He hadn’t seen any on the drive to the residences, and as he headed towards the building he presumed was Porter Hall he failed to notice a single college students. It’s not to say the campus was devoid of people, far from that. There were in fact many security guards, in a higher density than Jack had ever seen before in his visits to Bensen. With the lack of students, however, the northern campus had a bit of a lonely atmosphere to it. Much like a playground without children, the freshmen residence grounds just seemed warped by the absence of the people it was constructed to host. It threw Jack off slightly, but he had a pretty good idea why there were no people.

After walking for about two minutes, the twig in a suit caught up to him.

“Jeez, not one to wait up for people are ya Jack?”

“As much as it may shock you, I don’t like when people poke fun at my hair.” Travis laughed. “Haha, well not everyone can have your, uh, “unique” color pattern of hair, Harigand. I’m sure he meant no harm by it. Y’know, to a security guard like him, you and I are heroes.”

Jack adjusted his hat and smirked. “That poor son of a bitch.”

Travis was smiling now. They had reached Porter Hall it seemed, because the wall of the building before them had a sign spelling, in gold colored letters, “James K. Porter Residence Hall, established 2010."

“True, true. Well anyways, there’s Porter. I’m going to go ahead and talk with that older gentleman Officer Feinstein mentioned.”

“And what am I supposed to do, stay outside and search for clues?”, Jack asked.

Travis put his hands behind his head. “Nah, I don’t think you’re much of the type to do anything like that Jack. Just wait near the entrance until I come back. Take a walk, admire the natural beauty of the astroturf, the fine fresh aroma of the plastic flowers, that sort of thing.”

“Alright, don’t get yourself killed in there Agent Davis. I heard these old security men are real hellions.” Travis simply gave a two finger salute to Jack and leisurely strolled into the main entrance of Porter Hall. Jack walked away from the entrance, figuring that Travis would text him when he was done playing detective. Jack noticed something that struck him as odd. A bit southwest of Porter Hall, and a bit northeast of the building across from Porter was a small shack. As Jack walked towards the shack, he realized that it was actually directly in the middle of the four residence halls, with each edge of the shack located diagonally from the four quadrant buildings. It was essentially smack dab in the middle of the Northern campus, yet Jack had failed to notice it before.

He wasn’t bothered by it, the comments of the security guard, Officer Weinstein or something, had dulled his senses. Moments before when Jack was speed-walking towards Porter, he hadn’t really bothered to take a good look around. With what Jack suspected to be a long time ahead of him, he considered checking out the small shack. He hadn’t eaten yet, so maybe there was a chocolate bar or something that he could buy. Jack didn’t vocalize it too much, but he loved sweet things. Mo gave him hell for it(she was more of a steak kind of girl), but Mo gave him hell for everything. Still, Jack figured the less people knew about his sweet tooth the better. Affinity for sweets was always seen as a weak point, and Jack had no pressing desire to give the fop more ammo to tease him with. Intentionally or not, Jack’s feet led him right at the door of the snug building. He shrugged his shoulders and opened the small wooden door. The lobby, if it could be called a lobby, was quite simple. About ten feet from the door was a small white wooden desk, with an unoccupied swivel chair behind it.

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To Jack’s disappointment, there were no vending machines or candy to be found. There was, however, an elevator to the right of the desk. The gray eyed man looked at the control panel for the lift. Jack wasn’t going to have a bunch of options, it seemed, because the only button on the panel was an upside down triangle. His finger hovered over the button for a few seconds, but Jack thought better of it and put his hands in his pocket. The elevator doors opened anyways. The inside of the vertical transport was covered with mirrors, but by all other appearances seemed to be a standard elevator.

“What the hell…” Jack said, and walked in.

The doors closed, and a slight vibration underneath Jack’s shoes told him he was going down. The elevator seemed to descend for a good ten seconds before the doors opened again. The sight beyond the elevator bewildered Jack. It seemed like the elevator didn’t descend at all, because the lobby Jack saw as the metal rectangles in front of him slid opened looked exactly the same.

Jack shrugged his shoulders and walked out.

“Oh, that elevator’s a tricky one. It won’t take you far unless you know where you’re going.”

Jack’s eyes spread in alert. Sitting at the white desk, there was a somewhat lanky man. Jack couldn’t see his face too well, as the man was wearing a purple top hat which was tilted as to cover up most of his head. In addition to the hat, the tall figure was wearing a purple petticoat and lavender velvet pants. On his feet, the figure wore simple wooden sandals.

“Nice get up.”

The lanky figure leaned back in his swivel chair and cackled. “I wear it for the dance, you see. I simply adore the art of dancing.”

Something about the man’s voice annoyed Jack. He couldn’t quite describe it exactly, but it just did not sit well with him. Jack titled his own hat and scratched his hair. “So what, this the drama building or something?”

The lanky figure stood up. “I suppose one could say that. This building is a smorgasbord of all matters dramatic. There’s a dance going on right now, would you care to take a look?”

On one hand, Jack was put off by this man. Drama building or not, the petticoat wearing man’s manner was a bit too forceful for Jack’s taste. However, he did have time to kill, and observing a performance certainly would make the waiting period more bearable. “Fine, I’ll check out a dance. Just, uh, don’t expect me to donate money to you or anything.”

The figure in the top-hat flourished. “Oh don’t you worry, the dances at Bensen have been here for a long time, and they’ll keep going, your contributions present or not. Now come, follow me if you would.”

Jack watched the odd man get up from his swivel chair. The man walked in an odd way, almost skipping as he stepped diagonally from side to side. He went to a door, a door that had been the entrance to the shack a few floors up. “Oh, excuse me for a second, I need to scan my card.”

The man reached into a pocket of a petticoat and pulled out a golden card, devoid of any pictures or even a bar code. It was simply a gold colored rectangle, as big as an id card. Jack watched a skinny arm place a golden card in front of the door, and heard…. Absolutely nothing. No click, no movement, not a sound or movement to show that anything at all had changed. Yet apparently the card did its job, as the man opened the door shortly after.

“Oh, I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Odysseus.”

Jack chuckled. “Mighty unique name ya got there. Mine’s Jack.”

Odysseus placed both of his hands on the brim of his tilted black top hat and cracked his fingers. “Well Jack, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Beyond the door was a tightly cramped hallway, barely wide enough for one person to walk down. Odysseus went down the hall first, placing both of his hands on the walls. Jack lagged about ten feet behind the taller man, placing his gloved hands in his pockets. Finally, after a short ten seconds walking at a moderate place, Jack came to a door at the end of the hallway. The door looked very simple, it was wooden, white, and rectangular. Odysseus grabbed the door and pulled it open.

“After you. A gentleman like myself never goes first, you see.” Jack couldn’t see much through the door, there didn’t appear to be much light if any at all beyond the opening. As if noticing Jack’s confusion, Odysseus chimed up.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be able to see much more clearly once inside. Of course, with your eyes, that isn’t really saying much.” Jack took a step into the room, but where he expected to meet concrete he instead met air. Off balance and taken by surprise, he fell face forward into the room that wasn’t really a room. Wind rushed past his face as he descended. The blackness he was falling into swallowed up every last bit of light the hall behind him had to offer. Down and down Jack fell, until he couldn’t tell if he was even moving at all. He couldn’t see, he could hardly even feel . Yet, just when Jack thought the darkness would smother him, his body hit something soft. He was no longer falling. Jack looked above, or at least in the direction he thought was above. At first, all he could see was darkness. But slowly and steadily, small lights… (from the ceiling? from the walls?) which looked like stars illuminated the room Jack had fallen into.

“Oh, sorry about the little bump. The journey to the dance hall is a bit unorthodox.” Groaning, Jack got up. He didn’t feel much pain at all, but his heart was thumping rapidily. The fall had unsettled him, and he was more than fed up with the treatment Odysseus had been showing him.

“Where the fuck am I?” Jack shouted, angry (for some reason he was a bit miffed) but also a bit confused. Drama building or not, a room with a pitfall wasn’t something he’d come to expect. And Jack had come to expect quite a bit from his life. The voice from nowhere rang out again.

“I told you where you were going before, didn’t I? You’re at the dance hall. Well, sort of. To be precise, you’re at the lobby of the dance hall.” Now with some degree of light present, Jack got a better view of the room. He was lying on a black cushion, about the size of a basketball court. There were black walls on all four sides, but the wall in front of him had two glass doors. The glass was foggy, so Jack could only make out a swirl of color beyond them. The room, however, was nowhere near as shocking to Jack as what covered his body.

“What the-“ Jack started to say, but stopped. There was no use wondering about the clothing he had on. There were white gloves where there used to be black gloves on his hands. His blazer was gone, replaced by a pink suit adorned with sparkles and a white rose pinned to his chest. Absent were the khaki pants, replaced by pink velvet trousers, the second part of his suit. His tie, however, remained.

“See Mr. Jack, you simply can’t view the dance while not dressed in proper attire.”

A figure descended from above, and Jack soon recognized Odysseus. He, however, was wearing the same ridiculous get up, apparently Odysseus’s attire was dance appropriate from the get go. Odysseus pulled out the gold rectangular card used earlier, and tapped it with his right index finger. The lights above Jack flashed, momentarily blinding him. When Jack’s vision returned to normal, his gray eyes observed Odysseus holding not a card in his hand, but a golden walking cane. Jack’s brain didn’t even attempt to make sense of what was going on at this point.

Odysseus twirled the cane in the air, and with a dexterity that seemed to spite his tallness, did a backflip. He tapped the black cushion, and the glass doors opened. Odysseus cleared his throat and bowed. “Right this way, my good man.”

Almost immediately after the doors granted Jack passage, a melody rang out. It was a combination of a violin and an odd screeching electric whomp, not too unlike dubstep, to Jack’s immense confusion. Seeing not many other options available, Jack walked through the door, Odysseus once more right behind him. The inside of the formerly blocked room was a stark contrast to the dark cushioned pitfall. The walls, floor, and ceiling(there did seem to be a ceiling this time) were covered in spastic rainbow bursts. Jack was glad that he was did not suffer from epilepsy, because the spastic rainbow spots seemed to swap color patterns with one another every five seconds. After rubbing his eyes for a bit, Jack noticed that he was in an auditorium, of sorts.

There were rows of theatre seats gathered about, leading to a stage. The seats also had a rainbow pattern to them, and were prone to changing colors every few seconds (It was at times like this that Jack really wished he’d sprung for sunglasses.) The stage seemed fairly normal as stages went, but the people on them caused Jack to do a double take. There seemed to be about three hundred people, dressed in a similar manner to Jack and Odysseus . There was two marked differences, however. The first difference was that the people(both men and women, though some of them were a toss up) on the stage appeared to be in their late teens to early twenties. That didn’t shock Jack, he was after all at a college. The second difference was that those on stage were wearing masks of a sort. The masks were transparent, but they looked like they were made out of stained glass. The stain glassed masks, combined with the rapidly shifting colors, made the faces of those on stage impossible to make out clearly. Jack felt an odd sensational on his left shoulder, and instinctively his right hand swatted the unnatural feeling. He turned his head around as fast as his neck muscles would allow. Jack’s efforts were largely unwarranted; it was only Odysseus tapping him with one long white gloved finger.

“Isn’t it just wild? The dance, I mean.”

Jack hadn’t really paid attention to what the people on stage were doing, mostly due to the bizarre and colorful outwits they were wearing. Now, however, he noticed that they were moving up around, but he couldn’t really call what they were doing “dancing.” On a step in the center of the stage, there was a girl(at least Jack thought she was a girl, her chest was flat and her black hair short, but the other features seemed to him to be sufficiently feminine) The woman? moved in an unnatural way, placing her left foot over her right shoulder while twisting both arms behind the back. In spite of this, she somehow managed to maintain her balance with only her right leg in a normal position. It was an impressive, if rather painful, demonstration of her? flexibility. What happened next caused Jack’s gray eyes to open wide, even wider than they had been open before. All of the other dancers, from the tallest and most fit to the pudgiest and shorter bunch of the group followed, almost to a T, the movements of the elevated dancer. Even without being able to make out the full facial feature of the dancers, Jack could tell that most of them were in severe discomfort, if not outright agony. They were too tense, the dance was too forced. Of course, the inherent wrongness of the display was only natural. Even a contortionist would have trouble pulling off the twists the dancers were performing. The lead dancer twisted her? limbs even more, putting her? head between her? thighs and crossing her? legs like a pretzel. A screeching sound echoed from the lead dancer’s neck, a sound unnatural and disconcerting to be sure.

Jack covered his ears hard with his gloved hands, but the muffling of his hearing did little to drown out the sound. It was obvious that the lead was in pain, yet she kept on contorting and twisting his body. To Jack’s utter bewilderment, the rest of the dancers followed in step, twisting their bodies as the lead did. Their groans of discomfort were even harsher, leading to a horrible cacophony echoing through the satire of a dance theatre. Jack couldn’t take it anymore.

“If it hurts them that goddamn much” he said, gesturing at the people on stage, “then why the hell are they twisting their bodies like that?”

Odysseus giggled and cleared his throat. “Oh, it’s simple. Because they were selected.”

Jack scratched the back of his neck. “Selected?”

Odysseus twirled his cane in the air. “You see, not many people get to dance like this. Many people apply, but only a select few get to do it.”

“Who the hell would want to do something like that? It’s painful and pointless!”

Odysseus shrugged his shoulders. “You use the phrase “pointless” a bit too easily. Performing this dance is a privilege, an honor.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “Make all the flowery excuses you want, but tell me, what do they get out of it? It’s easy to say it’s a privilege to do something stupid and senseless, but that doesn’t mean there are any tangible benefits.”

Odysseus jumped up and down and clapped his hands excitedly. “Oh, Jackie boy, you’re catching on! There’s –nothing- tangible about it, true. The value is only that which the dancers put on it. But therein lies the brilliance!”

“Funny, the only thing brilliant about this “dance” is that no one has broken a leg, somehow.”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand. If the dancers determine the value of the dance, the movement that you see before you can transcend common limitations. What you call “painful and pointless” can become of the utmost importance, can become something as critical as breathing!”

“Ain’t that like staring at a random bunch of colors and pretending to see a dinosaur or something?”

Odysseus shook his head. “No, far from it. When a so called artist does that, he or she is just making things up, finding aspects that do not exist. But this dance, this movement, it is tied down to those who partake in it. The dancers are the cause, the dance the effect. Eventually, the dance becomes so significant that it influences those who created it, and those who have the potential to create it. It’s beautiful, if you think about it. An abstract concept becomes real, something imaginary ends up affecting something tangible.”

“I’m just going to have to disagree with you here, Odysseus . Doing something painful simply because you and others view it as important is little more than intellectual masturbation, if you ask me.”

Odysseus gritted his teeth.

“Gah, I expected more from you Jack, you seemed like a cultured man.”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “You screwed the pooch on that one then. I’m about as cultured as the State Fair, and about as complex as deep fried butter on a stick.”

Odysseus sighed. “I take it, then, that you don’t want to watch this dance until it finishes?”

“No, and even if I did, I have somewhere to be. My smug associate wanted me to meet him outside Porter Hall, and I think I’m running short on time.”

Odysseus let out another childish giggle. “Oh, you won’t need to be worrying about that, Jackie.”

Jack groaned. “Name’s Jack, not Jackie. Always will be. And I need to be going back now, so if you’d hand me back the clothes I came in with and show me the way out I’d be mighty grateful.”

Odysseus pulled Jack close to him and smiled a jagged smile. The taller man’s teeth were sparkling white, but at the same time looked almost like plastic. “I’ll take you back now, “Agent” Harigand. But this won’t be the last time we meet.”

Odysseus lifted up his hat, and Jack struggled to break the hold Odysseus had on his arms. His teeth and nose looked fine, but his eyes..well, more accurately, eye… It was as if Odysseus was wearing a white headband that stretched around his head. Except there was no headband. The white stripe that circled the tall man’s skull was a shiny, somewhat veiny looking sclera. The sclera was as tall as an eye was, yet there was no pupil present. It was just a grotesque strip of white, from ear to ear. Odysseus leaned and whispered into Jack’s right ear.

“I wonder, Jack. Will you come to understand the dance, or simply remain an ignorant observer?” Jack formed a knuckle with his left fist, closed his eyes, and struck at the man violating his personal space with all the might his constricted limb could manage. Though he usually couldn’t tell, he felt his hand strike something hard. His eyes opened.

He was no longer in the twisted theatre, and his clothing, from his black gloves to his khakis, were back to normal. Jack’s left fist had made a bit of a scratch on an otherwise pristine magnolia tree. Jack took a look around; he was standing in a concrete rectangle scattered with wooden benches, right in the middle of the four quads. The time on his watch read Eleven Forty.