"That's not what I meant to say." Riven thought as he closed the bathroom door behind him. "Is this the spirit's influence again?" he questioned as the wide-eyed expression of Jake and Julius from moments ago flickered through his head.

  "Is it a result of my magic not fully replenishing yet?" he questioned.

  he noticed as he took off what remained of his T-shirt and night pants.

  he thought while slipping on the freshly bought t-shirt that statically charged his hair as the cotton went over him.

  he surmised as the gray sweatpants, socks, and boots followed.

  Narrowing his eyes as he tied his bootstrings, he partially grimaced, the action looking more like an instinct than an actual expression of stress.

  he thought, knowing he had questions to answer the moment he left this room.

  "The spirit isn't going to let me go with just one question answered, and it's not likely it'll allow me to incapacitate them."

  "I'll just have to hope I can bend the truth to be as vague and/or be as misleading as possible," he confirmed to himself as he put on the matching hoodie over his head.

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  Turning to the door, he placed his hand on the knob, but before he could twist, the corner of his eye caught onto something that made him freeze and his breath hitch because for the first time since he changed, he saw his own reflection.

  Not a flicker of it from the glass or other reflective surfaces as he walked through a destroyed building or a shaky humanoid image he saw as he looked at a puddle while lying against the wall of a destroyed crater.

  No, it was an honest and true reflection of his tousled, gray, unkempt hair, which was nothing like his styled crimson locks, or his deathly pale skin that bordered on a gray skin tone, far from his familiar reddish-brown-toned skin, but it was his eyes that caught him the most; they were how dead they looked, like a fish's.

  "I look dead," is all he could think to say as the emotions that he assumed would be rushing to the surface were suppressed before he could even feel them.

  Before he could dwell any further, there was a hesitant knock on the bathroom door. Turning away from the mirror, he opened it to see Jake and Julius, but they weren't the only ones; behind them were three others.

  A girl who he recognized as Mona, who looked to be 15 or 16 with short dark violet hair and emerald green eyes that had bags under them, as if she had just woken up out of her sleep, was wearing starry pajamas.

  To Mona's left was Caroline. Who looked to be the same age, if not older by a year or so; she had dark blue hair. That contrasted with her azure-blue eyes, which greatly complemented her ivory skin and heart-shaped face; while having similar bags like the first girl, she instead wore a fancy-looking school uniform that looked crumpled and unironed, probably from falling asleep in it.

  And standing beside Caroline was a boy who looked to be the same age as Riven himself, if not a little younger; his skin was a light brown, and his ocean blue hair nearly matched the girl beside him, tousled in a similar manner as his, but his most alluring feature was heterochromatic eyes, one ocean blue that matched his hair and the other a dark purple.

  And his name was Ryuji.