ALMOST IS NEVER ENOUGH | TVD [3]

V • MONSTER'S BALL

five. monster's ball

Whitmore College, Business Studies Classroom

The lecture hall for junior-level is packed with students, and Minerva Sophia Devon is one of them, who is sitting in the third row and two seats away from her sits an African-American young man with a shaven head and hazel eyes and he is dressed in a simple gray T-shirt and dark blue jeans to which she earlier mistook him for Jesse, but remembers that he isn't taking the subject with her. As the professor is lecturing in front of the room, Minerva is writing on a piece of paper, presumably some notes, with a bored expression on her face as she can slowly begin to hear Jesse's familiar voice.

In confusion, she looks over at the young man to see him paying full attention to the professor, the topic they are discussing which is already studied with much effort by Minerva and she is not really paying attention.

"My insides, they're burning up. I'm hungry."

Seeing that everyone and everything in the room is normal, Minerva resumes to write, her head resting on the palm of her left hand, her elbow propped up on the table as she writes while she can then hear Dr. Wes Maxfield's voice, "Subject 62547. After his initial transition, 62547 has undergone three days without feeding. Subject is weak but lucid. Upper left and right cuspid normal after blood stimulus is removed." An experiment.

Minerva sighs heavily, as if feeling pressured by the familiar though peculiar voices, from somewhere else, which only she can hear and obliviously, she began to write faster with no apparent reason. "Pupils are at full dilation. Sensitivity to light-- an obvious eleven on a scale from one to ten."

"What the hell is happening to me? Why am I so hungry? What are you doing to me?" Jesse responded anxiously in pure confusion, eyebrows furrowed.

"Subject is confused yet self-aware. Personality seems intact. Hunger remains primary focus. All in all appears to be a perfect candidate."

"Psst. Hey." The young man two seats away from her taps Minerva on her right shoulder, to which she winces before she turns to him cluelessly. He gestures to the front of the room, in which she looks on that the professor has his stern gaze on her, him and almost half of the students awaiting for Minerva, being the one, to answer the question that has been provided.

"Miss Devon?" The young male professor called out one more time.

Minerva almost choked on her own words when she replied, "Oh, pardon?"

He sighs before asking again, "Okay. Let me repeat that..." As he does so, Minerva sighs and looks down at what she has written, only to see that she has repeated the words 'HELP ME' in every empty space she could fill, revealing that she has been automatically writing them in a fugue state.

****

Motel Room

Nadia, who is on a phone call with the sassy Alexandra, is in the room with Katherine; the immortal psychic is in her parked silver Mazda in the woods.