Oliver half expected Dindet to be standing in the living room looking as dumb as she was. When she wasn't, he rolled his eyes and went straight to his room.

"Ols-" His father started to reach for him but the boy shot a quick glare at him and ignored the attempt. He didn't want comfort. He wanted to be mad. He wanted that stupid clown to make sense for just once.

He frumped face down on his bed and let out a muffled scream as he bit into a pillow. Eventually, he turned over and stared up at the ceiling as the lights flickered back on when his father flipped the breakers.

He could hear him downstairs, walking around until he heard the door to his parents room shut, then he closed his eyes, clenching them tight to keep tears from streaking down his face.

It was dark out now, and had been for a while when Oliver turned his head over to peer at his alarm clock. 3:00 am.

Oliver sat up, and moved to his window to see if the clown was back yet. If she was, she wasn't sitting on the porch, so he headed back down to the living room. He flipped on the lights and circled around the couch, throwing aside the quilt just in case she was under.

Oliver felt a small pang of guilt as he glanced around the room. It felt odd that she wasn't back, popping in with a dumb smile and dragging him off to some place she thought was fun as her usual apology. It didn't matter.
It was good she was gone. She only made things worse.

Oliver turned toward his parent's room and quietly crept toward the door to peek inside. His dad was lying on the bed, splayed out in an exhausted slumber in the dark. Oliver glanced back up toward his room for a moment, then snuck through the door and crawled up into the bed next to his dad.

"Where's Dindet?" Douglass caught up with Oliver as he trudged up the road, he looked even more loathful than he usually did.

"Gone."

"What do you mean?" Douglass glanced at the gauze that peeked out under Oliver's sleeve, ignoring the sinking feeling in his chest. She couldn't really have left before the semester was over, could she?

"I mean she's gone!" Oliver snapped, picking up his pace with a quiet mutter.

"Before winter-"

"YES, Douglass." Oliver shot a glare at the kid, forcing him to drop the subject all together. Douglass fell behind him, keeping enough distance as to not tread on his already frayed nerves.

"My Dad found a new conduit for his machine." He said softly.

"That's great, Douglass." Oliver replied, though he wasn't listening. Douglass had absolutely nothing to say that he would want to listen to. In fact, he would have preffered it if this last week before school let out would pass without him socializing with anyone. Whatsoever.

"Its really cool, some kind of-"

"I don't care." Oliver cut in gruffly, glancing back at him for a second before he came to a stop at the edge of the road.
Douglass squirmed uncomfortably for a while, mentally going back and for with himself on whether or not he should mention it at all.

"Is it because you ran away?" He asked tentatively, keeping his eyes to the ground just in case Oliver was glaring daggers at him, but the boy didn't reply.

They stood in silence for a bit, as the bus pulled to a stop with a squeal of its brakes. At that point, Oliver sucked in a preparative breath and turned to face him.

"Yeah..it was."

Sometimes, the cold, laminated wood of your composite desk is the only thing that keeps you present and tethered down to the world. That's exactly what it was trying to do for Oliver but he simply, truly, didn't care.
Not about last night, or his father, or Douglass knowing about it, and definetly not the teacher raving about the trip to AKAN lab this friday.

Douglass had forewarned Cassidy to prevent her from trying to console him, but Oliver could see that infuriating pity and concern in her face out of the corner of his eye when he turned his head.
She didn't say anything though, which made is worse. Like when someone only asks you if you're okay because they saw you cry. Except backwards.

"Oliver Tarsul to the counselor's office."

Oliver's head shot up at the grainy announcement and swiveled his head around to the teacher who shrugged and gestured toward the door. He stood up, furrowing his brow at what he knew was going to be a bad time and headed straight down to the counselor's office.

Oliver slumped down into the chair across from Mrs. Bradshaw, who for once, wasn't nose deep in student files.

"You called me?" Oliver had his attention more on the small window that faced the atrium and the crinkling brown vines that shook in the wind.

"Oliver, it has come to my attention that things haven't been too great at home." She stated frankly. Oliver sat up in his seat and turned his full attention toward her now, slow anxiety creeping up around him.

"W-what?" Who told you, was what he wanted to say, but he bit his tongue and let her continue.

"A fellow student's parent informed us of your runaway attempt and I know how hard things have been for you after the death of your mother...So, the principal, and I have decided a small counseling session after lunch every week might be benificial."

No. This wasn't happening. Seriously. This couldn't be happening.

"I don't want to." Oliver muttered, hunched forward and keeping his eyes on the cup of pens on her table. He'd done all of this before. Back when he and his mom left Matthew. He didn't want to talk to some dumb school counselor about things she never would actually get. He didn't want to talk to anyone.
Mrs. Bradshaw leaned forward, holding her hand out in meager and unconvincing attempt to provide comfort and Oliver sat further back in his seat.

"Oliver, I know things are hectic, and it's alright to talk to someone about it." She said in that empathetic type tone that he knew was about two steps from a CPS call.

"I don't need to talk to anyone." He retorted, picking at his sleeves in case she saw his bandages.

"It's your choice." She answered, standing up and heading toward the door to open it for him. Oliver got up too, and followed her to the door.

"Then I choose not to." He affirmed briskly, stepping past her and heading straight back to class. He wanted to go home, he thought about doing just that. Skipping out of class, sneaking out through the gym and just walking back home. That would be a terrible idea though, if he wanted to maintain the fragile illusion that everything was perfectly fine.

Oliver quietly sat back in his desk and shot Douglass a hateful glare
It wasn't his fault, but he wanted it to be. Oliver ruminated in the strong desire to blame everyone around him, his dad for being so obsessed, Dindet for getting his hopes up for nothing, Douglass for this stupid aftermath.

It was his own fault though. And he knew it.

Chris tapped the glass of a large container, pressing the clicker end on his pen into his lips while he studied the increasingly strange substance that morphed and floated inside of it.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and began recording notes.

"Substance seems to mirror the sample I borrowed from Jon, but it's significantly more dense." He rambled, shifting his attention to the other thing he picked up along side the cubes in the cemetary. "The only thing it naturally responds to is this oval thing."

The scientist pulled on a pair of latex gloves and began inspecting the small round orange thing. He was sure it was some kind of organism, algae, or a type of plant maybe? It looked familiar to the one Douglass had brought home a few weeks back.

Chris hesitated, glancing back at a true of scalpels in quiet battle for the best way to go about understanding whatever this thing was. He would start with safer tests first.

He plucked the orange thing from its makeshift stand and brought it over to the container, gently pressing it to the glass to see the reaction the gelatinous substance would have.
Immediately, the colloid splattered itself against the glass, growing dense around the little ball before slowly fanning out like water rippling on a still surface.

"It seems to naturally attract the substance, but-" he stopped, pulling the bean away and heading over toward a D-cell battery. He set down his recorder and lightly pressed the positive end of the battery to the small organism, all while keeping his attention on the substance in the container. "Small currents cause the substance to contract."

Contract it did, the congealed mass balled up tight, aside from small spikes that shot out on occasion, rippling off of the black goo and solidifying into perfect cubes on the floor of the glass.

Chris made his way toward his energy converter, grabbing a small magnet along the way and pressing that against the bean as well.
The black mass lost its tight, spikiness and wilted out for a moment until it almost completely liquified, a few small bits of it hung in the air like ash until they withered away.

"Magnetic current also seems to affect it." He set the magnet down with a slightly apprehensive sigh. "The matter isn't enough to conduct..I've tried to parse out the sample I got from Jon but after a couple of tests, every single trial dissapates the matter."

Chris rolled the small thing in his fingers, contemplating the decision he had to come to at some point. This thing kept all that matter collected and condensed- theoretically, if he threw it in there with a test, at a low voltage, nothing big at all, it could probably keep it from dispersing into the air.

On the other hand though, this was a monumental discovery, and if he claimed it as a new species, he could reap the benefits of that...in a few years.
He didn't have the time though. He needed something now. He needed to take care of his son.

Chris set the bean down on the counter, heading out of the garage toward the kitchen and slumped down in the dining chair. The table was stacked with collection letters and bills, and he nearly had a heart attack when the power went out. He thought it was due to his reluctance to pay the electricity.

It wasn't reluctance. Or neglect. Missy was a fickle, expensive woman and regardless of if he got majority custody, the settlement on top of the accident was breaking him down and this was the only chance he had.

Dindet remained silent, out of herself while her thoughts jumbled up around her. She could see the man when he left, tasting a concoction of guilt and worry in him that swirled up around him when he moved around. She couldn't move though, not without the rest of her, and that was stuck in a jar and the room buzzed with crystalized magnetism that kept her trapped and dizzy and in pain.

She struggled even to make herself whole, and it didn't help that the scientist would return eventually to zap her unconcious.
She was a mess of colors herself, whirling and whipping purple terror and black terrible nothingness and inside all of that she recollected an even worse thing. A memory.

It was like everything was happening all at once, except only half of her knew what it was. The worst kind of dread drew up inside her and all she could do was sit there and wait to die.

The scientist returned, murmuring to himself quietly when he came to take her from the table and he shoved her into some other jar with a piece of her that, if it weren't so small, she could have escaped.

"I hope this works.." He prayed quietly, turning over the jar for a moment before setting it inside his miniature electromagnetic conductor.

The machine flipped on, and the clown heard a faint ticking noise, followed by some growing whir that evolved into a scream as a bolt of electricity shot through her and every particle contracted in terrible pain. She wanted to scream, the agony of every last piece of her arcing lightning through her was far worse than she could have ever imagined. And it wasn't stopping. There was no darkness after it, just terrible, horrible suffering. Until it stopped.