Jacob was making his way to the feast. He didn't want to go and he was terrified of what Felton and Ember might do to him. Considering that either they were the ones who left him that horrible virtualizer talking about killing off all their classmates or whoever had trapped him here, did. He didn't know if the pair were even real; if they were the ones who trapped him here or if they were merely part of someone else's sick game. As he made his reluctant way to the grand hall he saw Ember dancing past him, almost gliding on fairy-like feet. She seemed to be in a good mood, for she waved at him quite cheerfully before entering the hall and getting herself seated.

  Jacob sat down next to her reluctantly. he knew it would be impolite to sit apart from them and despite everything he still found her to be the least dangerous-seeming of the two. There was something about Felton, particularly when he was incarnated as that boy Mist, he was cold and purely terrifying. Though initially, Jacob had just found King Felton to be rather unpleasant and snooty. Yet a frozen and sinister air hung gravely about his presence and the more you were around him, the more noticeable it grew.

  Felton took a bite of roast chicken and did not even acknowledge Jacob's presence at all. All the rain-mist that swirled outside the golden-paned window was so very white and beautiful but knowing it was supposed to represent trapped spirits( there was a metaphor for his own entrapment in there somewhere) didn't exactly fill Jacob's heart with cheer.

  Jacob realised he was probably coming across as quite sullen but before he could force a smile, Ember put down her piece of roast chicken swimming in thick, luscious globs of gravy.

  "Cheer up, Jacob I like you. I won't sick the beast on you again, promise."

  Felton for the first time that night, acknowledged Jacob.

  "We hardly need to, Ember," he said.

  Ember looked over at him and clapped her little hands in sudden delight, causing her red-gold hair to bounce prettily and the fiery ends to trail across her dainty shoulders,

  "You're dead right," she said.

  "It isn't good to glower Jacob but if you do, well we shan't have to put up with you for long. Beast or no Beast."

  Felton grinned as Ember paused and then continued;

  "We can always Wrighthouse him."

  Jacob's blood ran cold and his heart nearly stopped, both with rising fear and righteous rage. His hands balled into fists. Wasn't Wrighthouse the name of the school where all those adolescents died?"

  Either they really were somehow both murderers and plague-bearers or they were treating such a delicate subject matter, like a sick joke.

  "You, know," Felton said mockingly, "They creepily-nicknamed our old school, the plague school. On a count of how everyone died there. Except for us as we cannot perish."

  Strangely enough despite it making no sense, Jacob believed him. The pair did seem untouchable somehow. Maybe that was simply because they were not real beings though, just someone's gross little holo-projections and murder fantasies brought to life for a laugh. He wished he could slap the other boy's face, and Ember, well perhaps they could lock her away forever in a tower somewhere. When he finally finished his last, beautiful, golden potato with a gulp, somehow feeling the pair would expect him to finish and being so very hungry despite himself, he nevertheless got up and quickly-fled. Wondering once again why he was here and who the hell Shiver and Mist were.

  Six months ago, a young man named Evan James Wiley had received his very first message from the AI, Monovalent. It was a Virtual mail, and it explained the story of a man called Aryan and a group of scientists and two children who had been hybridised with a virus. These two young people, alongside Monovalent himself, were to be used as weapons to aid in a political revolution. Weapons under the control of would-be revolutionary Aryan. Who believed history dictated that you couldn't establish true peace or overthrow evil systems, without a little bloodshed. Such as that seen in the bloodied overthrowing of various monarchies and dictatorships.

  Monovalent could communicate with Evan telepathically via their shared mental connection. His mind had apparently been wirelessly hardwired to the AI. As well as wired to a fellow child called Alice. So they could all communicate via wireless electrical impulses. Monovalent had sent a regular, Virtual mail as not to freak out the boy too much on first contact. "It was to be done as soon as you were old enough to understand," Monovalent had explained. However far from being freaked out by this occurrence, Evan found it intriguing as nothing had ever excited him before.

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  He was informed in the Virtual mail that he was one of a pair of children created with a purpose and now it was time for him to fulfil it. Being biological warfare and a weapon to grant power to The People’s World Unity Party and eradicate all their enemies... Evan could really get on board with that.

  The very next day, Evan and his parents had been in the living room of the large box-like mansion Evan called home. The huge house despite its status, high-tech gadgets and grandeur was ugly and unappealing or so Evan had always believed, wholeheartedly. Outside it was painted neon white, with a concrete garden stripped of all its trees, bushes and greenery. Evan had at that moment, been refusing point blank to attend his prestigious boys’ high school.

  The living room walls sparkled too clean and white, the sofa was pristine but boasting bright fairy-floss for cushions. Matching the duvets and equally candied pillows that were the garish adornments in his mother and sister’s pastel, pink-wallpapered bedrooms.

  The mansion’s immense hall was a poor man’s iridescence, unnaturally bright. With a cutesy fuzziness that was as sickly and tainted as a canary trapped for fickle human amusement and was blinding against bright-pink curtains.

  The games room led out onto a wall coloured as if with clown’s hair and a sofa lined in the grimacing shade of his oversized lips. His dad’s room was a slightly pleasanter avocado-green yet the dining room leered as pale and bluish as medicine-tablet powder.

  The rest of the house except the hall and Evan’s and his dad’s room boasted neon-white carpeting and hideous, striped, flowery, multi-coloured curtains. Evan’s room had been lime-green once but for his birthday insisted his room be painted. Sea-green with the bedding indigo-blued though the ugly, light carpet and curtains remained the same.

  His mother always said Evan’s darkly painted room was depressing. Evan always said the rest of the house was vulgar, tasteless and repugnant. Not to mention childish.

  The curtains in the rest of the house were a toxic mixture of ugly shades including brighter, lime green, canary yellow, light orange and of course his mother’s favourite colour lurid, vibrant pink. This was all a consequence of his mother’s dubious "choice" in girly decorations. The narrow aluminium windows gave the house a claustrophobic atmosphere of suffocation.

  ‘You did so well last year Evan honey,” his mother had said, “why are you failing now?”

  “I felt like trying last year,” Evan had replied in a voice that was soft but highly contemptuous. "I wanted to see if I could come top and beat all the other boys, and now that I have, I don't need to bother anymore. I don't need to prove myself and as I have no intention of working, it would be futile and a wasted effort to continue attending. I’m fifteen and don't have to.”

  “Actually, you have to attend till you're seventeen, the rules were changed quite a while back,” his had father said.

  “I know that” Evan had responded, “but I’ve enrolled full-time at some music course and as that counts as education I don't actually need to attend an official high school.”

  “A music course?” His mother had blanched her peevish, botoxed and heavily made-up face white as a sheet beneath her orange-tan (a sight that made Evan physically ill). She was dressed in her usual skin-tight, neon pink pants; pastel pink high-heels, chunky, brass-gold jewellery and a revealing, garish top, this one lime-green. Hard to see a woman of forty dressing like a teeny-bopper with horrifically bad taste, Evan had thought. Candy pink and lime green, she could not have picked two colours that go together less well.

  “What do you intend to do with your life son?” his father had asked. “You can't go making a living off your violin,” he'd then said trying to be reasonable.

  “I won't need to make a living,” Evan had responded, putting derisive emphasis on the hackneyed phrase. “I’m going to become a part of Aryan Gray's Party, Unified Wealth Equites, otherwise known as Dear Leader’s, “People’s Unity Party.” As soon I turn sixteen and I am old enough to join. He's recently announced two more Party places. For two very special young people who will move in with him and be right at the forefront of the campaign, when he runs for office. The young are the future voters and leaders of political change after all.”

  “How do you know you'll be able to rise up that high in the ranks of the Party? “ His father had asked this calmly, trying to be reasonable.

  Evan had looked at him with one of his direct, blank, expressionless looks that never failed to make his father flinch. Then he had proclaimed with a scornful smile, “I know because I’ve already been made the offer, and will be staying and studying under Aryan this next year while attending my mandatory music course.”

  Evan, deciding the matter at hand had been quite settled, had walked out of the room without another word and then gone off to play in the game room. He found most virtual games boring but the game he had played that day, had been quite interesting. You played a master manipulator and trickster who had to kill all human life but you had to make them annihilate themselves, you couldn't harm another human being directly. You could play either as a group or just be solitary. Evan usually preferred to play alone.

  As he had been moving across a shared landscape with other virtual players, a diabolical idea had struck him. One that was really fun. If he was mentally-connected to the AI who made all the virtualiser realms, could he too, influence what people saw in their Monovalent-derived, virtual reality? Turn their worlds into a monstrosity of nightmarish oddities, where he was the puppet master.

  He had decided to covertly ask the AI. "Yes, it is possible," Monovalent had said in its strange metallic voice, with a distinct hint of amusement to it.

  "Aryan wouldn't like it but if you slip it past his notice...And well, nothing much gets his attention as he considers himself too important to spend much time monitoring my virtual worlds beyond the bare minimum of functionality. Our co-creator Emanuel won't care or will find it amusing."

  I will be like a hanging, overarching mist," Evan had happily proclaimed, "Turning all their beautiful but insipid, virtual worlds into an entrapping dreamscape of my own making. it will make them scarier and far, far more interesting." He had then smiled. Sincerely.