Another day risen, Page sighed and pulled herself clumsily from her bed. 

This time her nightmare had been of the more incoherent sort; which at least meant there were no bad thoughts to cling to her when she woke. Still, the same could not be said for bad feelings, and Page could feel a cold sweat clinging to her skin as she tried to stop her hand's heavy shaking.

She quietly crept out of her room and through the pitch darkness of her house's hallway, feeling against the wall for the bathroom door. Outside her house Page usually enjoyed the calm of the morning; but inside the confines of her home, the silence felt deafening.

She managed to briefly blind herself with the bathroom light, before running the faucet and splashing her face with cold water. In the mirror tangled hair and tired eyes stared back at her. Pupils that felt alien, but would not look away. Page turned off the faucet but those eyes remained, drawn into her reflection. Searching for a sign that it was herself she was seeing in the glass, not the vaguely familiar animal that it felt. A suit of flesh her mind floated inside of. She stared until she could no longer stand it, and had to force herself to look away. She started to leave, but found herself pausing at the doorway without realizing. She pressed her palm against the wall beside the doorframe, trying to process why her hand felt like a foreign object.

Page knew that this mind frame she had spent years trapped inside of wasn't her. And that eventually, the feeling would pass. She blinked her eyes, again fighting the urge to look at the body she didn't feel a part of. This had been happening less often in recent years, but it felt no less painful when it did.

On with the routine. Again.

Waiting for the Pole to come, Page felt exceedingly discontent in the moonlight of the morning. There was a sense of constriction in the air, as though something were holding her back. Page felt an irrational need to lash out, and when the Pole finally did arrive, her feelings heightened all the more. 

Page walked into the academy, down the library shortcut, and onward toward the 'Principal's Office' just the same as always. But as she neared the door, she could swear she heard movement coming from inside the room.

 Rustling?

Were her nerves getting to her?

Page decided with a self-annoyed 'screw it' that her day couldn't get much worse, and fully aware how foolish that type of thinking was, slammed the office's heavy wooden door open and charged inside.

Only to find someone else was indeed there; and now directly face-to-face with her.