Rise of the Monster Rookies

Bad Man - Rain

Mark was in the middle of relaying the details of an April Fools Day prank that his swim team had tried to pull off on their coach - with disastrous consequences - to his new acquaintances when the receptionist slid open her window and craned her head out. "Mark Young?" she called, and Mark bid a quick goodbye to his new acquaintances. He folded the flier up and tucked it into his pocket before doing a quick check of his guitar case and hefting it up onto his shoulder.

The receptionist wore a nametag that identified her as Mrs. Aija and Mark found her more intimidating than anyone else in the room. She had the impeccable grooming and dress style of a woman who had grown up in the 1950s. Mark had never truly understood the phrase "doesn't suffer fools gladly." It had always seemed like a quaint outdated saying that only ever showed up in books teachers made you read for the school curriculum. Now looking at Mrs. Aija and her short bob of curled hair that looked as if each individual strand had been artfully arranged by a television production crew, the hackneyed phrase seemed to take on new meaning. He tried not to fidget too much under her coolly competent gaze and hoped the actual judges wouldn't be as scary. She completed whatever mental assessment of him that she had been making and handed him a large name tag with LA044 printed on it, which he dutifully pinned onto his shirt.

Mrs. Aija led him to the door at the end of the room and into a long unusual hallway. The walls were a light blonde wood, crisscrossed with dark lines so that they looked like a tangle of bare branches. The pattern on the carpet was dizzying, a riot of colorful bird wings and eyes and beaks. Mark could feel himself slipping into a childish mental game of counting how many bird faces he stepped on as he followed Mrs. Aija. Between the lavish ballroom, the cheery waiting room, and now this long flashy hallway, Mark really didn't understand the interior decor choices of this peculiar building.

The hallway started to curve gently to the left until Mrs. Aija rebuked it with a sharp "Stop that" in Korean and then the passage straightened out. To Mark's surprise, a bluejay unfurled itself from its fellow avian compatriots and flew - or more accurately, slid, its way from the carpet and up to the wall to perch on one of the bare branches, where it fixed one baleful beady eye on Mrs. Aija.

The hallway seemed absurdly long, but Mark was no longer surprised by this. He was sure that the length of this passage was also physically impossible when looking at the outside of the building.

They eventually stopped in front of an emerald wall covered with a design that made it look like a mass of leaves. Mrs. Aija cleared her throat, then said loudly, "let us in, please," and all the birds flew off the carpet to perch on the branches of the walls. The image that remained underneath their feet was that of a large golden jaguar who blinked sleepily at them and opened its mouth in a wide yawn. Then it padded from the floor to the green wall and as it walked into the wall, the leaves parted like a curtain, revealing the large black rectangle of a hole.

Mrs. Aija nodded at him and said, "Be careful of any surprises you may encounter, Mark Young." Nothing else in her demeanor or expression changed, but Mark had the unmistakable feeling that she expected him to walk through the black hole of a door.

"Okay," he said, a tad awkwardly. "I will, thank you." Then he walked through the door.

The room inside was... a practice room. It had a floor to ceiling mirror on one end and the other held a long table with five chairs. The first thing Mark noticed was that he could see his reflection in the room's mirror and he had to stifle the sudden powerful urge to go up to the mirror and inspect the image more closely. Ever since he had woken a vampire, he had never been able to see his reflection. Even taking phone selfies only yielded a blurry picture. He wondered what he looked like now, if anything noticeable had changed in his features once he became one of the dread undead. He wondered how the mirror had been engineered or manufactured to produce vampire reflections. He'd definitely ask once he made it into the group.