Sleep Mode

He burst into a fit of manic laughter. It didn't help that, upon closer inspection, the "body pillow" was covered in short blonde hairs; he didn't even need his scanner to know that it belonged to Dimaria.

Still cackling, he stuffed it back into the hole beneath the floorboards and began searching around for more hidden panels. Unfortunately, he found nothing else, and decided to move on to the next door.

---

It wasn't long before he happened upon the next one, entering the tiny room just as he had before. This time, he found no loose floorboards - instead, his searching fingers found a hidden compartment in the wall.

The contents of the compartment appeared to be boring at first - just stacks and stacks of paper. He began wondering if, just as the last one had been Dimaria's property, this one belonged to Invel - but that was soon ruled out as he glanced over the first bundle of stapled-together parchment.

Neinhart's name was printed very clearly on the first page in black ink.

---

Wahl replaced the papers and stepped out of the tiny room, shutting the door silently behind him. As well-written as Neinhart's stories were, he didn't care to read about human mating habits - he wouldn't touch the subject with a ten-foot pole. As he moved onward to the next hidden door, he vaguely wondered if his findings were the "horrors" that the rumours referred to.

---

At around six in the morning - a safe half-hour before Invel, usually the earliest to rise, would wake up - Wahl returned to his room. Tucked under his arms were the fruits of his search: the body pillow and the "fanfiction", along with a photo album he hadn't opened yet and a rather disturbing collection of voodoo dolls.

He crept back into his room and tossed the objects onto the floor. Sitting down cross-legged as he usually did, Wahl observed the objects, deciding to take a closer look at the voodoo dolls first. They were small and white, with string hair and tiny stitched-on eyes. Close observation of the one he had picked up showed that it had long red strings for hair, almost like Irene. Upon inspection, he found that the other ten voodoo dolls were based on the rest of the Spriggans... except Bloodman. Well, that made it obvious who the dolls belonged to. It was probably how he took revenge when the others got on his nerves.

He poked the Wahl doll experimentally, but felt nothing. Wahl guess that he wasn't affected due to being a robot.

Shrugging and tossing the dolls aside, he picked up the photo album. According to the hastily scribbled writing on the inside of the cover, it belonged to Irene, Invel, and Jacob, and was "never to be opened". The next few pages were sheets of paper with messages like "seriously, don't open it" and "I'm warning you" scrawled across them.

Ah, here were the photos. Wahl peered closely at a shot of Ajeel holding a permanent marker, grinning and flushed in the face from alcohol, leaning over an unconscious Dimaria with a mustache sloppily drawn above her lips. The one beneath it pictured Brandish, giggling drunkenly, lying fully-clothed in the bathtub.

Wahl flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to look more closely at a random picture. A blurry shot of the top half of Neinhart's wide-eyed face, Serena trying to push into the picture from behind him; Larcade, wearing a tablecloth as a (somewhat oversized) cape, stumbling off the edge of a banquet table; a grinning Irene pouring a bottle of beer over Bloodman, who didn't seem too pleased about it. All of the photos had the too-bright quality of photos taken by Wahl's built-in camera - and yet he couldn't recall any of this happening, let alone taking any pictures. Had someone hacked his memory and deleted them?