It was after school, and, as usual, Lana met up with Abbie by his locker. From Miss Emily's class she made her way through the school's various corridors to the hall where Abbie always waited.

Abbie, as always, was putting things in his locker as Lana approached. The inside of the locker was stuffed with papers and the occasional textbook. It was more paper in the locker than actual locker, by the looks of it. Lana didn't doubt that a lot of it was the assignments he was missing in various classes.

Abbie hadn't seen Lana at first, so when Lana gave him a bright hello without previous warning, he jumped nearly out of his skin, briefly lost his balance... and fell onto his butt onto the tile floor of the hallway.

Lana giggled. "Sorry! Didn't mean to scare you!"

This, in fact, had happened before, so Lana wasn't really surprised at Abbie's shock. It was just a silly thing about Abbie - he was very jumpy. Lana was okay with that, everyone gets startled every now and then. Lana extended a sock-puppet hand - the sock puppet Pop, to be exact - to help Abbie to his feet. After a moment of processing what just happened, Abbie shakily let Lana grab his hand with Pop's mouth and pull him to his feet.

"Did you finish your homework from last night?" Lana asked him once he'd regained his bearings.

Abbie sighed. "You know how it goes by now."

He shoved some crumpled paper in his backpack and zipped it up.

"Aw, I'm sure it was fine!" Lana assured Abbie. She, herself, didn't quite finish everything either. In her eyes, as long as she finished the work for the stricter teachers at least, everything was alright. Even if she might've gotten close to none of the problems right - Miss Emily had brought her in for tutoring on multiple occasions by now.

"Ehhh..."

"Come on, Claire offered to do homework with us this morning," Lana told him. "She'll help you with tonight's homework so you get that finished!"

Lana and Abbie, of course, had no idea that Claire had gotten detention. Abbie agreed, happy to have some more help with his school work, and accompanied Lana as the two traveled down the corridor towards the library.

The two arrived, and Lana quickly scanned the room. No sign of Claire. Maybe she hadn't gotten here yet. So she and Abbie simply found an unoccupied desk and sat down. They knew they should start on homework, but they decided to chat for a little bit, just to wait on Claire.

Lana noticed Engel enter the room. Usually Engel was with Claire, so Lana's hopes rose when she saw him. But then he seemed to look around, a seemingly worried expression on his face, and Lana could tell he knew as much as she did.

Engel set his eyes on Lana and Abbie, and after a moment of decision made his way over.

"Hey, guys," Engel greeted.

"Hi, Engel!" Lana said back with a wave of her sock puppets.

"Uh... I don't mean to bother you guys, but have either of you seen Claire anywhere recently?" Engel asked. "Usually I meet her after class, but I couldn't find her anywhere."

That wasn't reassuring at all. "No, I haven't. I was waiting for her, too, she said we could work on homework with her."

Abbie nodded in agreement.

"Damn it," Engel sighed. "Mind if I join you guys, then? I'm sure Claire will show up soon, she's probably just talking with a teacher after class or something."

"Sure!" Lana exclaimed. Engel dragged a chair over to the table and sat down, beginning to happily chat with Abbie and Lana as he started doing his homework (he seemed to have much more drive to do it than either Lana or Abbie).

Everything was fine for a while until eventually someone's voice came over the school's old crackly intercom system.

"Abbie, please report to Miss Circle's room."

Abbie froze, eyes darting to the ceiling where the intercom was, then to the door, and then to Lana and Engel. Engel looked... concerned, to say the least, and gave him a reassuring thumbs up. Lana seemed to also give him a thumbs up, it was just harder to tell considering her hands were engulfed by sock puppets. It looked more like her puppets were twisting their mouths weirdly. She smiled at him enthusiastically, completely oblivious to any possible danger that her friend could be in at this moment.

Abbie smiled shakily back, nervously standing up and heading for the door. He couldn't help but notice Oliver standing with his friends near the back of the library, staring at him. Oliver snickered, and Edward and Zip both exchanged similar "ooooohs" of anticipation. Abbie was certain they knew exactly what Abbie knew must be about to happen. Not having anything to do about it, Abbie just turned around, swallowed his fear, and opened the door to begin his walk down the hall.

The hall felt like it was longer than usual. The school felt big. He felt small. All of his already shriveled confidence began to drip away, his eyes glued to the floor with his arms hugging himself as an act of self-comfort. There were others in the hall, most not bothering to spare him a glance. None spared a word. They all just kept to themselves. And why wouldn't they? Abbie wasn't any of their business. The danger he knew he was in wasn't shared by anyone. He was just meeting with a teacher, was all. The ten-foot psychopath with a compass arm teacher.

Maybe she's just gonna... help me with the topic, Abbie tried to tell himself. She wants to go over last night's homework with me and help me out. Yeah. That's all.

The thought was so much a lie that it could barely set into his brain.

After what seemed like hours Abbie arrived at Miss Circle's classroom door. He must've stared at that knob with dread for a full five minutes. But Abbie shook that trance away, anxiously reaching out for the doorknob, taking a deep breath, and stepping in.

Abbie stepped into the classroom to be immediately greeted by Miss Circle herself. She was sitting at her desk, legs crossed as she leaned back into her chair. As Abbie entered the room she set down the paper she was holding - Abbie didn't catch a glimpse as to what it was.

"Took you long enough. Sit down."

Her voice was frigid, frigid enough to send a chill down Abbie's spine. Abbie attempted to swallow his fear as he managed to get his wobbly, jello-feeling legs to move towards the chair that had been dragged in front of Miss Circle's desk. There used to be a desk it belonged to in the front row, however the desk itself was broken. Abbie wondered what had happened there.

Miss Circle's narrow gaze burned into Abbie's soul as she slid the piece of paper across the desk for Abbie to see.

"Tell me what this is."

Abbie looked at the paper and felt the color drain from his face as he saw the bright red circled F in the top right corner. His heart was already pounding frantically in his chest, but now it was about ready to break free from his ribcage.

"M... m-my... my t-test," he managed to say with a tremor in his voice.

"What's that grade right there?"

She tapped the F with a black claw.

"A-a-an... a-an F."

"Could you tell me why that is, Abbie?" Miss Circle asked. Her expression never changed - a cold glare that couldn't hold anything less than cold-blooded psychopathy behind it.

Abbie stared with vague terror at the failed test for a moment. He never took his eyes from it. Better than looking Miss Circle in the eye.

"Because I... I... d-didn't s-study?" Abbie tried. He really didn't know why he'd failed the test. He does usually do horribly on his tests, but he's never failed before - usually he gets a D- at least.

Miss Circle stared at him a moment more before standing up. Suddenly she seemed so much more threatening than before, filling her fullest height and nearly touching the ceiling with her sharp horns.

"You know I don't tolerate anything below your usual grades. And those were already on thin ice." Miss Circle stepped from her chair and started walking around the right side of her desk. Her compass needle was out, and Abbie's eyes were glued to the deadly point as it became visible around the desk.

"I-I c-can get better, I-I can raise my grade! I swear!"

"Don't interrupt me," the math teacher snapped. Abbie flinched back, shrinking.

"I know you can't get better," she continued. "You can't change that grade. Even if you improve overall, that grade will never go away."

Abbie knew that. He looks at the ground again.

"You know we have limited resources, correct?"

"Y-yeah." The school was supplied by what was left of the government system, along with a few organizations of humanitarian efforts. Still, though, food was not something you could simply waste around here.

"Well, then maybe you know that we can't support students who don't live up to our standards."

Miss Circle lifted her needle to Abbie's throat. His eyes widened.

"So I'll have to fix that now."

But as she brought up her compass to swing, Abbie suddenly bolted from his chair. It came down in a swipe, attempting to land a blow, but Abbie managed to jump towards the door and out of the way. Abbie grabbed for the doorknob, twisting it and yanking it open. He lunged out of the room, stumbling over his own feet as he heard Miss Circle's furious snarl from the room behind him.

Abbie regained his balance and started to run as fast as he could. Miss Circle ran out of the room behind him, slitted eyes finding Abbie escaping, and she also started running after him. There was a malicious gleam in her eye and a wicked smile on her face as Abbie turned around and, terrified, pushed faster.

Abbie was chased down multiple hallways. At every corner Miss Circle attempted to lunge at Abbie, claws and compass extended to grab him and tear him apart. Abbie managed to turn the corner fast enough to evade those sharp, deadly weapons most of the time, but there were enough close calls that Abbie decided he needed a better plan than just run away as fast as possible. There was no way to exit the building, after all - there was nowhere else to go.

He spotted a double door to his right. Determining it to be safe at half a second of observation, Abbie lunged for it, opening it and slamming it shut behind him.

At first he thought he was safe, and began to take a breath. But he was suddenly knocked away from the door he had pressed his body against by Miss Circle slamming herself against the other side. The hinges broke, and she ducked to step into the room. Her giant figure towered many feet above Abbie, and glared down with a devilish grin plastered on her face.

Abbie had been knocked to the ground, hands behind him and knees drawn to his chest as he frantically backed away from Miss Circle. His back hit the wall inevitably, and suddenly he found himself between it and the certain death that threatened to crash down on him at any moment.

Miss Circle held up her hand, revealing Abbie's failed test crumpled in her claws. She pressed her compass needle against the page, poking a hole in it before dragging the needle down the center. The page tore in two, the half with the dreaded F on one side and the rest on the other half. She dropped the two halves of the paper at her feet.

Abbie was trembling with terror. He could only imagine what would happen next, but one thing he was certain of:

He was going to die.

-

Lana kept looking at the door. Claire hadn't shown up yet. But more importantly, Abbie was not back yet.

What's taking him so long? Usually Miss Circle doesn't keep students this long.

Engel, looking up from his math homework, saw Lana's concern on her face. He assured her with an attempt at a smile.

"Hey, I'm sure he's alright. Maybe they're... working out an assignment. Or Abbie ran to the bathroom on the way back. He's fine."

He sounded a bit like he was also trying to convince himself. Unhelpful.

"I'm gonna go find him," Lana determined, standing up from her seat.

Engel immediately shook his head at her. "Let's just wait. He'll be back."

Lana did want to sit down and hope that he was alright. But she had this knowing feeling in her stomach that something, somehow, wasn't right. And she wanted to ease that.

"I won't be long! Bye!" Lana decided, ignoring Engel's warnings. She ran off towards the library door.

"Lana-!" Engel called after her once. But seeing that he couldn't stop her, he just sighed, and, muttering something under his breath, proceeded with his homework.

Lana ran out into the hall and slowed her pace to a quick walk. First she went down to Miss Circle's room, where he was supposed to be. The door was ajar, and she peeked through the open doorway. Neither the math teacher nor Abbie were there. There was a chair in front of Miss Circle's desk that wasn't usually there, and it was knocked over.

Frowning, Lana began to speed walk down the corridor away from the classroom. All was fairly normal in the school...

Until she heard a scream.

She was in a fairly empty part of the building, so no one around was there to notice. But a high-pitched, yet male scream had pierced her ears, one that she recognized easily.

Abbie?

Nervous now, Lana began to run around, looking in every abandoned classroom in the hall. It was a double-doored room that might've been a small recreational room at some point, closed. Except, of course, for the right door, which was entirely off its hinges. Lana looked inside.

Suddenly her limbs were caught in a frozen trance of terror. Her eyes caught sight of Abbie first, staring with wide, bloodshot eyes at the door where she had looked in. She had never seen anyone so beaten and injured. There was blood everywhere, splattered on the wall and the table nearby and pooled on the floor beneath his legs, one dismembered at the shin and the other bent in a twisted, unnatural manner. Half of his trembling face was soaked in his own blood, and through his skull was a giant compass needle dripping with the very same blood. Slowly the compass lifted Abbie from the ground by his impaled, bloody skull and held his limp body high in the air.

It was none other than Miss Circle at the other end of that compass. Her eyes, usually angry but calm, were wide and wild with glee as she opened her grinning mouth and sank her teeth into Abbie's torso. It was difficult to tell whether Abbie was dead or alive, but either way all he did was violently hack up maybe a gallon of blood that washed down his neck like a dark waterfall. Miss Circle tore her mouth away with a giant hunk of Abbie's flesh in her jaws, with it falling multiple organs freed from the insides of Abbie's body. Miss Circle promptly devoured that chunk and bit him again, dragging intestinal tracks from their place and also taking more flesh with it.

Lana was terrified. Horrified. Dizzyingly so. There was her best friend, the bestest friend she'd had in her entire life... being cannibalized by her own teacher. One of her sock puppets, trembling, reached up and covered her mouth as she stared on.

Miss Circle met her gaze. She was still grinning, bits of Abbie still stuck in her teeth and blood splattered all over her face and on the white collar of her shirt. Lana couldn't move. Fight or flight had kicked in, but she chose to do neither and simply stand there frozen with a mortified expression.

"What are you doing here."

It wasn't stated like a question, but a statement. A demand. Lana gasped slightly, taking a small step back. But she never ran. Just stared in in horror.

Miss Circle dropped Abbie by the wall, his disemboweled, half-eaten body slumped limply in a lake of blood. One of Abbie's eyes rolled from its socket and bounced as it hit the ground, rolling a little until it came to a stop near one of his feet. The other hung by a thread in a mess of bone and what was left of his brain. Miss Circle shook a few bits of organ tissue from her compass and grabbed a dusty handful of pencils from an old jar someone had left on a desk a long time ago.

Before Lana could run she was yanked into the room, and multiple pencils suddenly found themselves deep in her skull. One of her eyes burst like a boba bubble as a sharp graphite point reached the back of her eye socket. A scream erupted from Lana's throat, her body finally realizing it was in mortal danger as the adrenaline kicked in and caused her to begin thrashing and struggling against Miss Circle's grip. She tried to pull one of the pencils out, but suddenly the sock puppet head of Pip at the end of her arm was sliced away. Pop's head was severed quickly as well by Miss Circle's needle, and finally her cries were silenced by a needle driven through her throat.

Circle panted heavily for a moment, standing there with her compass needle in Lana's neck. Lana's remaining eye had rolled back in her head, the other just a mess of blood with a pencil sticking out of it. What she wanted to do was exactly what she did to Abbie - mutilate her beyond recognition, devour her innards. The taste was heavenly, and she craved it like nothing short of a drug. But, of course, some things were too good to be true.

"Circle."

Circle stared at Lana's corpse for a moment more before turning her head to the door. Grace. The principal was standing in the doorway with her hands behind her back. Her eyes were narrowed, a sharp gaze staring directly at Circle.

"Just what are you doing?"

She was quite calm about the situation, though a hint of anger was audible in her voice. Circle stared at her for a moment, a trace of her smile still stuck on her lips before she finally seemed to relax her face. She sliced her needle away from Lana, severing her head cleanly from her neck. The student's body slumped to the ground, and her head landed a few inches away from it. Her tongue had limply stuck out of her mouth and now her teeth bit into it with the weight of her skull on her jaw.

"You know what I'm doing."

That was her only reply. She wiped some blood from her face and shook her head slightly. Her inhumanely long hair was a wreck now, and the movement allowed a few bits of tissue to come free from the black strands.

"I thought we talked about this. You can't just go around and kill your students every time they fail your class."

"You know as much as I do that it's necessary," Circle hissed through gritted teeth.

"Really, it's not. At all, in fact," Grace disagreed. She looked down at the pool of blood that had reached the edge of the doorframe, and kicked a bit of what Circle guessed to probably be Abbie's stomach towards the inside of the room.

Grace let out a sigh, more annoyed than anything as she looked back up at Circle. "Go to the detention room and go fetch Emily. Take her place there for the rest of the evening."

Circle scoffed, almost offended. "You're putting me in there? You know I can't stand being around those assholes any more than I have to."

"Which is exactly why I'm sending you there, maybe it'll teach you a lesson about tolerance," Grace snapped. She knew punishing Circle would do nothing, but it was the best she could do for now. This vicious cycle was endlessly awful in her opinion. She motioned to the macabre mess that was the classroom they were standing in. "Would you rather clean this up then?"

Circle glared at Grace for a moment more before huffing in irritation and walking through the blood lake, quickly turning into a sea now as Lana's blood joined Abbie's, and out the door. Her large boots left a few bloody prints outside the door, but disappeared as the blood wore away from her shoe soles.

Grace watched her round the corner, then returned her gaze to the room.

It's just like your last day, huh, Alice? A bloody mess.

A shame. Lana and Abbie weren't always the brightest kids in the room at any given time, but they had potential. And they certainly didn't deserve Circle's idea of punishment.

She adjusted her monocle, and her hand brushed the paper stuck onto her right horn.

I can't keep this place up for too much longer. One wrong move, and half the staff'll be out for my head.

I wish you were here, Alice. You may have simply been a student attending this school, but you were the best I've ever seen at running a place like this. And I'm sure Oliver misses you, not knowing why you're locked up.

If only.

-

3649 words

Longer than I thought but I'm not complaining I haven't written that much since the last time I updated NTB lol-

ANYWAY SOME L O R E IN THERE WOAH