Your story starts something like this: an invitation. An invitation sealed with the winged crest of Hope’s Peak Academy. An invitation that, for better or for worse, was going to change your life. The memories surrounding the arrival of it are hazy at best nowadays, as if even if you rubbed your fist against a foggy window, you’d only find the outside still obscured with raindrops and the new smudges of your hand.

There might’ve been a celebration, balloons bought and the expensive wine glasses taken out of the cupboard. Hugs could have been passed around by relatives, advice and praise that’s now long since faded in your memory could have been exchanged, or it might have been something quieter, softer, more private — shared over dinner with soft smiles and nervous-exciting musings. What were the students going to be like? The teachers? Perhaps you’d gone out to treat yourself, shared the news with the employee serving your ice cream, watched as their eyes grew wide and felt the pride grow in your chest. Maybe all what you’d done was catch sight of the seal and scrambled to your phone, mass-snapchatted your friends the news and read over their replies with the invitation sitting in your lap.

Are you going to accept it? Haven’t you heard the rumors? Damn, nice job! What if one of those horror stories happen to you? haha, super-highschool level nerd, amirite ;p? Congratulations! Don’t forget the rest of us!

Good luck, have fun!

(...)

Your story continues: 24 classmates. 24 classmates and a clear blue sky or the reflection of water rippling across the floor. Either way, you see blue, and everything looks as though it is glowing. You share either handshakes and smiles with the people you’re to spend the next three years of your life alongside or give upturned noses and crossed arms as you regard the other claimed “Super High School Level”s. You make friends or watch friends being made, chattering over badly prepared canned-soup or yawning into the back of your hand as you gaze at teenagers walking to and fro. Your guides here are famous, two of Hope’s Peak's finest! They are full of either encouraging words or advice laced with sarcastic remarks, and your vacationing before the start of the new semester seems all too good to be true. You’re excited, proud, ready.

Then something akin to a movie happens, a student is killed — a student arrives — through a magic portal, sharp teeth and a red eye and a threat reeks from a bear’s mouth, and suddenly nothing is glowing anymore. One day you wake up and your guide (buried in a makeshift grave. an antler sticking from his forehead.) is dead. Murdered by one of you.

You don’t know how it happened, how it got to this point, what you did wrong other than accept, but now there is blood on your invitation. There is death and crying and sleepless nights and yelling and arguing and blood and fear and hollow eyes and glitches and trials and they were right and voting and nights curled together and is this place even real? and killing and where’s your family and blood and blood and—!

(...)