Dannys graduation class is especially liminal thanks to the portal and frequent ghost encounters/ Their overshadowing. Which means, that they subconsciously prefer places with high ecto ambience.
Gotham University already had their fair share of students from amity park, one of the only people outside from Gotham who would actually stay for the duration of their studies (thanks to them being used to ghost shenanigans). But this year its more than usual + even for Gothamites these Amity Parkers seem to be rather unhinged.
(I just need more liminal!Amity Parker shenanigans :D and thanks to WE Gotham has great scholarships available)
I had a lot of fun with this one! Thank you for the prompt!
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Robert’s hands shook as he brought the chalk to the blackboard, letter’s jagged and words illegible as he attempted to write the day’s lesson down.
Behind him was a silence beyond what the human mind was ready to comprehend. A room full of people, the sense of others in the room, and yet utter stillness. No soft scratch of pencils on paper, gentle taps of nails upon keyboards, no shifting of bodies or crinkling of snacks or soft murmur of voices of those at the back of the lecture hall whispering to each other.
It was something Professor Robert Herne hadn’t truly noticed before this semester. How much noise humans made even when they were sitting very quietly. Little things the brain filtered out so terribly noticeable until it was gone. The almost imperceptible hush of breaths. The absent hum of a chorus of heartbeats. Things you didn’t realize you were used to hearing until they were suddenly, horribly gone.
The chalk broke beneath his hand.
The students sat in impossible, unbearable stillness, watching him.
They were always watching him.
Unblinking eyes, fathomless and deep and knowing knowing knowing. They looked at him and saw. Empty voids that threatened to swallow him whole if he made the mistake of meeting their terrible, all consuming gazes.
His hand shook harder, the broken chalk in his hold crumbling to fine dust. His breathing came harder, heart pounding. Behind him figures stretched long, twisting and unnatural, more and more unblinking eyes opening to stare at him, mouths stretching, faces warping, skin mottling to impossible shades, sharp teeth and pointed ears. Still as death, unmoving, he could feel the weight of them pressing down upon him from all sides and, and, and -
He screamed.
-
Miriam Schuster, Dean of Gotham University, sat with her head in her hands at her desk. Outside on the quad yet another of the school’s professors was being carried away on a stretcher, screaming and frantic as his class of students all milled about worried for him at a distance.
Herne was the third one in the past month.
Amity kids, she swore, they got weirder and weirder every year. And unlike some members of the University staff, she was qualified to say that. She was an Amity Park kid once upon a time, she knew her home town was weird. Even before the ghost stuff started happening they had a reputation for being odd. She’d certainly creeped out more than a few of her own professors over the years as a student, and still put some people on edge whenever she forgot to make an active effort to appear more…for lack of a better word, normal.
This year’s batch was weird even by her standards though. Far more ecto-contaminated than the students that had joined the university in previous years and it showed. The entire non-Amity half of several courses had dropped in the first week of the semester. They’d had more dorm-room transfer requests than they’d ever seen before. TAs were refusing to work in classes that had Amity Parkers in them. And the professors…
Herne gave another scream of terror outside, shrieking about silence and eyes and being watched. Miriam sighed again.
The professors were not able to cope with the freshmen class at all.
Scrubbing her face in her hands, Miriam leaned back in her seat and looked down at the papers spread out before her. Transfer paperwork to group all the new batch of Amity kids into the same classes so that they weren’t quite so spread around. Keep them contained, as much as it was possible to do so. The problem with having them all in one place though was that the effect of them being so…well, Amity, was far more intense. Which left her with the question of just who she was going to be able to get to teach these classes.
Gotham was more up to Amity Parker strangeness than just about anywhere else - outside of Amity itself of course - and even the Gothamites where having trouble keeping up. It was going to take a special kind of person to be able to handle them.
Miriam glanced out her window again to where the ambulance was trundling away with Herne aboard to Arkham. The civilian mental facilities hadn’t been up to the kind of psychosis caused by direct contact with this year’s batch of Amity Parkers.
Hmm, she considered. That might be an idea.
She’d have to make some phone calls.
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“Alright settle down! I know you’re all a rowdy bunch, but I’m gonna need yous to sit pretty for me for the next hour so we can go over the new syllabus.”
To anyone else, there wouldn’t have been any kind of perceptible difference to the utter stillness of the room. The rows of seated students were as still and motionless as they’d ever been, not even their chests seeming to move as they sat and stared, unblinking.
The new professor smiled widely. “Thank you! And hear I heard yous were all a bunch of troublemakers, ha!” A deft hand snatched up a piece of chalk, drawing large looping letters on the board with plenty of flourishes. “Welcome to Psych 101! You can all call me Professor Quinzel!”
Harley spun to face her class, smiling brightly at the eager gleam in the eyes of her new students.
The class, with eyes a little too bright and teeth a little too sharp and shapes a little too wrong when viewed from the corner of the eye all smiled back brightly. It was such a relief to finally have a professor that actually had her shit together.
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