The hum of Luke’s laptop was the only sound in the room, filling the quiet space with a faint mechanical whir. The hard drive, salvaged from the wreckage of the faculty room, sat connected to his computer, blinking weakly as it struggled to spit out what little data remained intact. The others sat nearby, sprawled across old desks and chairs, waiting for something interesting to happen.
“So… how’s it going, computer boy?” Sen asked, resting his chin on his palm.
Luke didn’t even look up. “It’s slow.”
Hakari groaned, stretching her legs out across a desk. “How slow?”
Luke sighed. “Imagine watching paint dry, but the paint is also actively fighting you.”
Sen leaned back, swinging his feet up onto another chair. “Sounds like a blast. Totally worth breaking into a locked room for.”
Ignoring him, Luke adjusted his glasses, staring at the screen. The recovered files were an absolute mess—scattered fragments of logs, cryptic notes, and file names without actual contents. But certain phrases kept repeating. Project Eidolon. Memory Retention. Behavioral Adjustments. The words made Luke’s stomach twist.
“I’m getting pieces,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “But nothing concrete.”
Hakari lazily tossed a crumpled candy wrapper at him. “Then stop talking like you’re in a sci-fi movie and just tell us; did we find anything useful or not?”
Luke scrolled through the corrupted files, lips pressing into a thin line. “I don’t know yet. Whatever was on here was wiped intentionally. Whoever did it wasn’t just deleting stuff, they tried to erase everything.”
Sen let out an exaggerated sigh. “Fantastic. So we risked getting possessed by a ghost for scrambled word salad.”
Luke ignored him, staring at one particularly garbled file. It looked like a log entry, but most of the text was corrupted beyond recognition. One sentence, however, stood out.
“The longer the exposure, the more difficult it becomes to revert.”
Luke’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, unease creeping up his spine. Exposure to what? The Dreamland Devices? Something else? A loud thump broke his concentration.
“Okay, nerd convention’s over,” Hakari announced, dramatically kicking a nearby box. “I’m officially bored.”
Sen grinned, stretching. “Guess that means it’s yearbook time.”
Sen and Hakari had stumbled upon a stack of old yearbooks buried in a forgotten cabinet, their spines covered in dust. To them, this was prime entertainment. Hakari cracked one open, flipping through faded pages of students who had long since graduated. “Alright, let’s see… 1999, 2001, 2003… Damn, some of these people look straight out of a horror movie.”
Sen peeked over her shoulder. “Oh, wow. He looks like he lost a fight with a bottle of hair gel.”
Hakari snorted. “And this girl, why does she look like she’s taking her mugshot?”
They burst into laughter, completely abandoning the mystery of the possibly erased brainwashing experiment in favor of roasting people they’d never met. Luke, still hunched over his laptop, sighed. “You two are insufferable.”
“We’re fun,” Sen replied, not looking up.
Hakari flipped through another section, pausing when she reached a glossy page labeled “Future Leaders of Tomorrow.” The students in the photo were arranged in neat rows, stiffly posed, their expressions unusually serious compared to the rest of the yearbook’s carefree pictures.
Sen peered over her shoulder. “What’s up with them?”
“They look weird,” Hakari muttered, tilting the book for a better look.
The students in the picture weren’t smiling, weren’t making dumb faces like the other clubs. They looked like they were in a job interview, not a high school extracurricular.
Luke didn’t even glance up. “Some schools do that. Special mentorship programs, prep groups. It’s probably just a leadership club.” Hakari squinted at the names listed below the photo. “Huh, a lot of these people have the same last names as some of our teachers.” Sen frowned. “Wait, seriously?”
She nodded. “Yeah, look—there’s Mr. Ashihara, Ms. Freiya… even Mr. Haynes.”
Sen blinked. “Okay, that’s actually kinda weird.”
Luke barely reacted, still typing. “Coincidence. Teachers’ kids probably ended up going here.”
Sen shot him an unimpressed look. “Wow, thanks, detective. Glad we have you on the case.”
Hakari kept flipping pages, but the unease from the Future Leaders of Tomorrow photo stuck with her. Something about it felt… off. Sen, feeling restless, grabbed another yearbook and started flipping through it. His casual page-turning slowed as he stared at a faculty section.
“Hold up.”
Hakari looked up. “What?”
He tapped the page. “Some of these teachers? They weren’t in the older yearbooks.”
Hakari frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean they just show up one year, like they didn’t exist before that.” Sen turned the book around, pointing. “Look—Mr. Ashihara? Not in any yearbooks before 2010. Same with Ms. Freiya. But they’re all over the more recent ones, like they’ve been here forever.”
Hakari flipped through the other books, checking. He was right. Some of the faculty they had always assumed were long-time teachers had no record in the earlier years.
“They probably worked somewhere else before,” she guessed.
Sen exhaled. “Yeah. Or maybe Shady High just likes hiring people out of thin air.”
Luke, still staring at his laptop, muttered, “Project Eidolon was never supposed to be forgotten.”
Neither Sen nor Hakari fully registered what he said. They were too busy flipping pages, lost in their own separate curiosity. Luke kept digging. And somewhere in the broken fragments of the hard drive, a corrupted file blinked back to life—a garbled image that had been partially restored.
A group photo. Of students. Standing in neat rows. All wearing eerily serious expressions. Luke's fingers hovered over the keyboard as the corrupted file stuttered back to life. The image loaded slowly, bit by bit, pixels flickering and rearranging themselves into something recognizable.
His stomach tightened. It was a group photo. The same one Hakari had just seen in the yearbook.
“Future Leaders of Tomorrow.”
The students stood in neat rows, just like before. Same stiff posture. Same serious expressions. But something about this version of the image felt… wrong. The contrast was off, the lighting too harsh. The students' faces looked blurred at the edges, like they were being erased by the very file trying to display them.
The screen flickered. The file glitched, static crackling from the laptop speakers. The image distorted, stretching unnaturally, before the entire screen flashed red.
FILE CORRUPTED.
DELETING…
Luke’s heart dropped. “Wait—”
But it was already gone. A second later, the screen went back to normal, as if nothing had happened. The file had wiped itself clean. Hakari, still flipping through the yearbook, finally noticed how pale Luke had gotten.
“What?” she asked, sitting up.
Luke stared at the blank space where the file had been. His hands hovered uselessly over the keyboard. “The image… It was the same picture from the yearbook. But it just deleted itself.”
Hakari blinked. “Okay. That’s not normal.”
Sen leaned forward. “So, uh, what are we thinking? Government conspiracy? Creepy AI ghost? Some kind of cursed JPEG situation?”
Hakari ignored him, looking straight at Luke. “What the hell is going on?”
Luke had no answer.
Just then, the door creaked open, and a familiar face appeared in the doorway. Yen Choi, Luke’s younger brother, stepped inside, his eyes narrowing as he took in the scene.
“Should’ve known I'd find you here,” Yen said, walking over to the group. He was quiet, but his presence always commanded attention. He glanced at Luke’s screen. “What happened?”
Luke looked up at him, still in a daze. “I don’t know. We were looking through the files on the old faculty hard drive. And the image just vanished. By itself.”
Yen’s eyes flickered over the screen before returning to his brother’s face. “Not surprising,” he muttered. “You’ve been poking around in some dangerous places. I’ve had a bad feeling about this from the start.”
Sen raised an eyebrow. “You think it’s connected to all this stuff?”
Yen didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he moved closer to the screen, his fingers lightly brushing the keyboard. “There’s a lot more going on here than you know, Luke,” he said softly, more to himself than anyone else. “Don’t go digging too deep into the wrong things. Some questions aren’t meant to be answered.”
Luke stared at his brother, his mind racing. Whatever Yen knew, it wasn’t just a casual warning. There was something else.
Something dangerous.