Time passed with excruciating slowness in the empty study room. Cian had continued checking his watch, and somehow only five minutes had gone by. Thirty-seven minutes remaining until the scheduled meeting time.
His mind began to slowly drift back to where it had been at the Rockfields, thinking, postulating, trying to make sense of his encounter with that overwhelming presence in the rain. It required a conscious effort to stop himself. That's why he was here, after all. He had to give himself a break, distract himself, at least until others arrived.
Cian pulled his laptop from his backpack—mercifully still dry in its waterproof compartment—and opened it on the table. The screen cast a cold blue glow across his face as it awoke, and Cian could feel its circuits humming beneath his fingers. He navigated to a folder labeled "Future Plans" and opened a document he'd been working on for the past few weeks.
In flowing red script, the words "Ole Miss" flashed onto the screen. Cian stared, almost breathlessly. He scrolled down to an essay that was about a quarter finished and paused again.
His transfer application. He had been working on it for the past few weeks now, mostly in secret. He still had months before the deadline—his sophomore year had just started at Redstone College, and this was for his junior year. But strangely, it wasn't Cian's meticulous planning, but the mere prospect of going that was motivating him to start early.
Ole Miss. Where both his parents had gone. His father had always talked about Cian going there someday, walking the same paths he had. Before the cancer took him. Before everything changed.
His mother didn't know yet. And Cian didn't know how she might react. Would she see it as abandonment, after everything they'd been through? Cian had stayed in Redstone to attend college because it seemed practical. It was cheap, and he was able to stay living at home. It had only been four years ago that he had come to Redstone, was he really ready to leave again, to leave his mother behind? But transferring was practical too, for his own future. A better biology program, more opportunity for research. Maybe he just wanted to feel connected to his father again, to walk where he had walked, to sit in the same lecture halls. The choice seemed so clear a few months ago.
But now? Now, he was sitting in a library study room waiting to meet strangers to discuss a vanished coffee shop, paranormal happenings, and inexplicable abilities. Now, the thought of standing in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium at Ole Miss, where he had been to countless football games with his father in the past, made him feel physically ill with sensory overload. With tens of thousands of people—tens of thousands of nervous systems all firing at once—he didn’t want to imagine the grinding cacophony.
Now, everything was different.
He was different.
Cian closed the document without making changes and slumped back in his chair, glowering up at ceiling.
In response, the light flickered briefly, off-on-off-on, mocking him. He stiffened, straightening up, and took a deep breath to regain control. He made a mental note to add the incident to his log later. Another goddamn data point.
Just then, Cian felt something—a subtle disturbance outside the door. A presence, human, but with something unusual about its signature. Not like the overwhelming entity he'd encountered in the rain, but still… anomalous. The field around this person seemed to... expand—no,
reach—outward, probing in a way that made the hair on Cian's arms stand up.
The knock came a few seconds later, soft but audible in the quiet room. Cian shut his laptop just as the door opened, revealing a tall young man in a rain-soaked hoodie. The stranger's blue eyes seemed to possess an unusual glare—almost a glow. Cian couldn't tell if it was a trick of the light.
The newcomer pulled down his hood, his energy palpable to Cian’s senses. Cian stifled a wince as he felt the rapid firing of neurons, the slight elevation in heart rate—classic physiological indicators of anxiety or tension.
Cian was bad with faces. Something about the stranger seemed vaguely familiar—maybe back from high school, maybe even from the Grotto? Whoever this guy was though, he was on edge, buzzing with a particular kind of tenseness Cian had come to recognize in himself over these past strange weeks.
"You're... the person who set up the flyers, right?" the young man asked.
Cian stood, perhaps too quickly, knocking his chair back slightly in the process. He adjusted his damp baseball cap instinctively.
"Yeah. Yes, that's me," Cian said, extending his hand out of habit before second-guessing the gesture. He wasn't sure he wanted skin contact with someone whose energy signature read so... differently. He awkwardly redirected the movement to gesture toward the empty chairs. With another glance at his watch, he said,
"You're a little early. Meeting's not for another twenty minutes, technically. Why don't you take a seat and get comfortable? I see you also got caught in the rain."Cian was still waiting for the tall newcomer to respond when another presence pinged on his newfound sensory radar. This one was again unique. Less probing than the first, more... radiant, somehow. Like the warm glow of incandescent lights rather than the sharp buzz of fluorescence. It pulsed outward in waves that felt almost soothing compared to the jagged electrical patterns of most people.
Then came the voice, booming with an overt cheerfulness that somewhat matched the signature he was detecting.
"Gentlemen!"Cian peered behind the first newcomer to see another young man arrive at the doorway, his bright smile contrasting with the slight limp in his step.
"Hey," Cian said, immediately straightening his posture. He repeated the gesture toward the empty chairs.
"Come on in. We haven't started anything yet."He paused, studying the limping man more carefully. There was something familiar about him, too.
"You work at the library, right? I think I've seen you around."He glanced between the two of them, feeling a sudden wave of relief as he soaked in the fact that people had actually shown up. Not just people—but two individuals whose energy signatures set them apart from the ordinary residents of Redstone. Maybe this wasn’t a waste of time after all. His hypothesis was gaining traction.
"I'm Cian," he said, addressing the newcomers.
"Cian Cahill. I put up the flyers about Grace's."He was suddenly aware of how ridiculous this all might seem from the outside—a biology student calling a secret meeting about a disappeared café. He drew in a deep breath, gathering his mind. There was no protocol for this kind of meeting, no scientific precedent for discussing what was about to be discussed. But these two had shown up, which meant they remembered Grace's. Which meant they might be experiencing changes too.
"I guess I should explain why I posted those flyers," Cian said. His accent made the last word sound like "flars," which almost made him cringe at himself.
"Obviously, something happened to Grace's. Not just that it closed—places close all the time. But it's like it never existed. The records are gone. Photos too. The place looks like it's been abandoned for years."He felt for their potential reactions, searching for the subtle electromagnetic shifts that would indicate
anything. Recognition, agreement, maybe fear.
"And I think," Cian continued, his voice dropping slightly,
"that some of us who went there, who drank Grace's coffee..."He paused before a small leap of faith.
"We feel different. In more than one way. And things around town, they feel different too. To me, at least."Another breath. He urged himself to not make the flights flicker again.
"So I guess my question, what I’ve been wondering about is… has anyone else noticed anything unusual since Grace's place came or after it disappeared? That’s why I set up this meeting, to gather data. I’m a scientist, not a conspiracy theorist."
Member
Tally Dor,
SilverPaw,
Chev,
TokyoPewPew,
Elmyra,
Carlyle,
PatientBean,
Redacted,
Fading Memory
