( Second Floor )
It was really just a coincidence that Arla Lawrence happened to be on the second floor and not in the basement. She'd come up to return a notebook to Xi'an, only to end up talking to Xi'an and Kurt for some while. It felt good having a semi-normal conversation for once. Maybe Remy was right about her hiding and the fact that she needed to grow up a little. She was almost thirty-one, after all. She could afford to suck it up, deal, and quit her whining.
She was just on her way back downstairs to see if there was anything good for brunch when she heard the crash, the commotion downstairs----and then, just a few seconds later, the two eerily familiar figures coming up the stairs.
No. No.
Arla thought she was going genuinely crazy----and after all she'd been through, it wouldn't have been a surprise if they were figments of her imagination. They were men who'd haunted her nightmares for years, men who'd murdered people dear to her... and men she'd been with with they were killed. Tommy had killed Riptide, blowing out his brains, and Arla... tch. Arla had killed Harpoon with her own hands, her own knives. There was no way he was up and walking again.
Then again, Elvyran was back at the school. There were reports of dead people coming back to life all over the place. But why, why would these two people be brought back?
Arla's mathematical brain was firing for a solution and she knew it had to be Sinister. If Riptide and Harpoon were back and walking? It had to be. no one else would have known to bring them back, no one else would be sadistic enough. Even if she knew this, even if she figured this out, it meant jack shit in the long run, when she had two old enemies just a few feet before her----who were probably hell bent on killing her, come to think of it. And she was unarmed.