Our Final Message.

C2

Papers by the dozen lay strewn everywhere.

No big deal, of course. They were allowed to, after all.

As long as the children cleaned up after themselves, none of the caregivers ever complained about the mess they made.

At least, most of the caregivers...

Still, the kids were relieved that, for the most part, their guardians weren't bothered about the disarray they often caused, big or small. In this colossal orphanage, there were dozens of caretakers working to help and, if anything, the caregivers were most worried about the children wasting all of the paper for their shoddy drawings. There were five children, after all, and even that amount wasn't much.

That said, most of those five children assumed that the carers could simply hide as many papers as they wanted without telling them. That would solve the problem, surely. Then again, what if the carers already did that? Clever.

As of now though, all five of them were plucking sheets from the lopsided stack of paper they had snatched from the third-story supply closet, shrinking the pile by the minute. Expected, maybe; After hours spent drawing, their creativity had dwindled to a minimum and found themselves jotting empty-minded doodles on their pages. At this point, there were hardly more than ten unused sheets and, even at that, they always aimed to either use as few papers as possible or leave no more than one paper untouched. Funny, they reasoned.

"Tic-tac-toe?" Gabe had offered, his voice drenched in boredom and four hard scratches of his pencil marking the gameboard.

"I'll play," Ellie insisted before anyone else could claim his offer.

"It's a mindless game anyway..." Soren mumbled, his gaze still fixed on his mockingly empty page. Like the blank page, his thoughts were the same.

Boredom gnawed at his chest and his head flooded with frustration as he racked his brain for inspiration. Whenever any of them finished decorating a sheet with doodles, they took another paper and tossed the discarded page onto their respective pile of finished scribbles. Now that Soren's pile stacked up to tens of pages, it was bitterly apparent that his creativity had drained away. Lucky, then unlucky. Naturally.

What to draw, what to draw...

Fools say, 'be inspired by what surrounds you.'

And to that, he replies: 'Thank you for your worthless insight.'

Maybe that kind of advice was effective centuries ago but, today, it seems rather cliche. By now, he's already tried those tactics dozens of times. The problem is, this cramped hall isn't giving him much to work with. They were in a sprawling hallway with dry paper and broken crayons littering the floor; what was special about it? Nothing. Simple as that. No matter how you spun it, it was just a hallway. A boring hallway.

As boring as today, he'd go as far as to say.

It wasn't a bad day, just a boring and typical one. A typical day of loosely following the same routine he abided by for years. A boring day, really. Nothing unusual. Apart from, maybe, jolting awake at the hands of another person. Maybe Soren could draw Magnus shouting wildly in attempt to wake him? It was the only noteworthy detail about today. Why was Magnus so determined to rouse him, anyway? Soren couldn't remember.

Impatience, he guessed.

That is, until he remembered.

Because breakfast would soon be served and they knew the rule: If you missed breakfast, you'd have to eat it at lunch.