The Vesta House Squad

27) A Literal Personification, Part 2

"Holy fucking shit!" Valerie cried, "Is she dead?!"

The other three rounded the corner and saw what she was looking at: Alexa's motionless body...well, not quite motionless. Her chest was slowly moving up and down.

"She's not dead dumbass!" Katrina said, "She's obviously still breathing."

"Oh yeah..." said Valerie, whose momentary panic had overwhelmed even her super intuition, "So what do we do now?"

Katrina thought for a moment.

"Okay, Arthur and Isaac, you guys take Alexa to Apollo House and I don't know tell an adult or something. Valerie, come with me."

"Where are we going?"

"We're going to look for Pandora."

And so, the four of them split up and headed their separate ways, with the boys carrying Alexa towards Apollo House while the girls tried to track down which way Pandora went. It was the boys who reached their destination first, with Isaac so as to let the Apollo kids know they were there without dropping Alexa.

"Yes?" said the bored Apollo kid who opened the door. Then, he recognized Arthur. "Oh gods it's you again. Okay, what is it this time?"

"We didn't do anything," Isaac replied calmly, "We just found her unconscious."

The Apollo kid glanced at Alexa and nodded. "Alright, bring her in."

The boys carried Alexa inside, and some of the Apollo kids took over taking care of her while Arthur and Isaac sat quietly in the "waiting room" portion of the common area listening to the Enya that was playing over the loudspeakers that covered the outside of the building.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the school, Valerie and Katrina were busy searching for Pandora.

"Do you really think Pandora had something to do with this?" Valerie asked, "I know she's kinda weird, but she's not...bad...right? Just...different."

Katrina hesitated. The truth was she didn't know, and she hated not knowing. Despite trying her best to let it go, she just couldn't get over the fact that she couldn't read Pandora at all. Having had her powers since she was a baby, Katrina couldn't even remember a time before she could read people's faces, and so the fact that she couldn't simply look at Pandora and tell what they were thinking or what type of person they were deeply bothered her.

"I'm not sure," she admitted, "But I think Pandora disappearing at the same time we find Alexa's body is too much of a coincidence and I think chances are she knows something about what happened."

This was good enough for Valerie and so the two of them kept on looking. It was proving difficult, as Valerie's intuition only did so much and after about half an hour, the girls were close to giving up.

"Dude, this is complete bullshit," Valerie moaned, "Let's just give up already."

"No. We have to keep searching," Katrina insisted, "There's only so many places that robot could be."

"But it's impossible!" Valerie whined, "We've already asked everyone around and none of them saw anything either."

It was true. The two of them had searched almost everywhere around the forge, asking anyone they came across if they had seen any robots. The only place they hadn't been to yet were the tennis courts.

The tennis courts were where the Ares kids liked to hang out during their free time. Like the arena, they were a wide open space and were located near the armory, but unlike the arena, there usually wouldn't be a lot of students around (surprisingly, most students thought training was more fun and cooler than playing tennis). This made it the perfect place for the Ares kids to spar and do other "Ares kids things" since it was less likely that there would be other kids there to challenge or snitch on them. Gradually, the Ares kids started just hanging around the tennis courts in general while the other students stopped going there altogether. Now, every new student is told not to go near the tennis courts, and Valerie was just thinking about this when she noticed Katrina giving her a peculiar look.