Isabel's crime can be found on this page. Hey! Please consider supporting Paranatural on Patreon or Ko-fi! Thank you very much! I hope you're enjoying this chapter as much as I am. :^)
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[Transcript]
“Hey, Isaac,” Isabel whispered, tapping on her clubmate’s shoulder. “Pause your anime.” A hunch, the slightest tingle of suspicion, had drawn her full attention to a far-off silhouette.
“...Wuh?”
Though Isaac’s fully-immersed focus had returned from an isekai wonderland, it was here that he now met the gaze and gleeful grin of a Cheshire cat. Reclining atop a distant bookshelf, staring straight at him and Isabel, was a feline spirit bound by golden shackles. Its ball-and-chain tail was swinging from its perch like a pendulum, and it snickered to itself as Isaac studied it, as if it knew some funny secret that he didn’t.
“Weird cat,” Isaac remarked.
“Excellent analysis,” said Isabel. “Hey, you know those sphinx spirits we beat up the other day?”
“The ones that told us Bayview’s doomed to be destroyed?”
“Yeah, the ones that told us Bayview’s doomed to be destroyed.” It was a worthwhile clarification; the club had lots of grand adventures just off-screen, and they’d fought at least three gorgons, two medusas, and a dozen different dragons in the last few months alone. No spirit had exclusive rights to mythologic theming. “You don’t think that weird cat could be part of the ‘litter’ those jerks mentioned, do you? Red, blue, green—there could be one for each of us.” Villains were always doing color-coded dark reflection nonsense just like that. “Maybe it’s here to get revenge for their... last failed attempt at revenge.”
“I don’t know...” muttered Isaac. “It doesn’t look like it has wings. You need those or you’re not a sphinx, I think. Unless you don’t have hair.”
“Mr. Starchman is a sphinx confirmed. Let’s get him.”
“We shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Isaac sagely concluded, ignoring Isabel’s joke. “It’s not like we can do much with so many people watching. Besides, the spirit’s only staring. Innocent until proven guilty.” He squinted at the creature’s stripes and shackles. “...Those chains could be a fashion statement. For now, let’s just keep our heads down and not maKE A SCENE!!!”
Isaac clapped his hands over his mouth. Everyone was far too stunned to shush him—the spectral’s voice had suddenly risen to the highest possible volume he could muster.
“NO YELLING IN THE LIBRARY!” yelled a booming student from behind them. “FLAG ON THE PLAY! DETENTION!”
Isabel watched in disbelief as an enormous football boy suddenly tackled Isaac out of his chair. Blitz, Number Five of the Student Council’s Black Saint Councilor-Generals, wrestled the spiky spectral to the ground, then forced a pair of handcuffs (inconveniently shaped like an “S” and a “C”) onto his wrists.
“WHAT! NO! I’VE NEVER SINNED! I’M PURE!” squeaked Isaac in a panic.
“ANY WORD YOU SAY AT THAT VOLUME CAN AND WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU IN A COURT OF LAW!” Blitz bellowed, beginning to drag Isaac off like a freshly-killed zebra.
“Oh my stars!” gasped Mr. Starchman.
“HEY!” a furious Isabel shouted. “YOU BEtter let him go right now!” A spark of surprise stopped her short. She’d been yelling just as loud as Isaac—an impulse that Isabel hadn’t questioned in the slightest—but as soon as she’d stood up to give chase, she’d crossed the border of a subtle field of spirit power... and lost an odd compulsion to make the loudest racket that she could within the library, where noise above a whisper was forbidden.
Isabel’s instincts drew her vision towards a distant, grinning suspect: the Sphinx of Crime had leapt down from her bookshelf with a graceful, clinking thud. From this new angle, Isabel could see the wings tattooed upon the grinning spirit’s back.
“Heh heh. Howzabout we set ourselves some new criminal records?” the Sphinx of Crime muttered, chuckling to herself. “No followin’ the rules: that’s the only rule there is once my Crime Wave comes rollin’ in. Heh heh heh...”
The sphinx slinked towards the gathered students like a storm on the horizon. Boots fell like rain and crashed like thunder as the Student Council flooded every section of the library.
“NO EATING OUTSIDE DESIGNATED LUNCH ZONES!”
“NO RUNNING WITH SCISSORS!”
“DRESS CODE VIOLATION! YOU JUST HIKED YOUR HEMLINE HALF A THUMB BEYOND THE BORDER, PAL! THOSE KNEES OF YOURS AIN’T NEVER SEEIN’ SUNLIGHT, JUST YOU WAIT!”
“ACCESSING JSTOR WITHOUT A SUBSCRIPTION?! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, EMPEROR GOD??”
Minor rulebreaking was breaking out like bad acne all across the library, a spontaneous surge of technically punishable misdemeanors. At the forefront of the Student Council legion on the scene, conveniently present to prosecute the offenders, stood two more Black Saint baddies... and the masked and scowling Student Council President.
“Like, ohmygosh. It, like, reallyislike TOTALfreakingchaos out here, guys,” chirped Pompom as the mayhem resonated with her propagandized worldview. “It’s superjustlike EscapefromNewYork(1981)directedbyJohnCarpenter, you know?? Like TOTALLY!!”
Bea narrowed her eyes with great difficulty (bugging out was their natural state, and the Black Saints’ Number Three seldom blinked while in the presence of a certain bubbly cheerleader). Did that mean that Pompom liked that movie, or did that mean she disliked it, since crime was apodictically flagitious (to put it lightly, and in language far too plain for Bea to use outside her brain)? She couldn’t be sure. How could Bea ask her nemesis out on a hate date to hatewatch her least favorite movies if there was any chance at all that Pompom might enjoy herself and then like her for REAL?! What would she even DOOoooOOOoo if that happened?! Bea had planned out exactly what she would do, in fact... but no one who did fire drills was eager to be kissed by searing flame!!
“What is this?!” Isabel snapped. She didn’t understand. How was the silly Student Council coordinating their ridiculous efforts with a spirit?? Isabel glared into the black void of their mysterious leader’s eyes. “Who do you think you are?!”
“YOU SHOULD STOP THE CLOCK, AND KNEEL,” roared Blitz, who made it very hard to ascertain the roving border of the Crime Wave. Isaac had been tossed onto his shoulder like a hot dog on a grill. “YOU RUDELY STAND BEFORE YOUR STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT.”
“I didn’t vote for him,” Isabel shot back.
“You, like, super CAN’Tknowthatforsure. He wastotallylike elected by, like, secret ballot, girlie,” Pompom drawled, twirling her hair.
“That’s not what that means!” Isaac cried out, reddening nicely as he rolled about on Blitz’s gridiron pauldron. “That’s not how voting’s supposed to work!”
“...Then you’re free to vote against me in the next election.” The President raised his cane to point at Isabel. “Arrest her.”
“For WHAT?!” Isabel exclaimed. This was a set-up! They were using that sphinx’s power to round up rulebreakers who couldn’t help but—
The President held up an oversized photo, a single frame plucked from a security camera’s footage.
“Is this you?”
The image clearly contained Isabel fully tackling Principal Pleezdoo... back when she’d mistakenly believed that she was Hijack.
“...I PLEAD THE FIFTH,” squeaked Isabel.
“I’M THE FIFTH,” boomed Blitz, lifting her up onto his other shoulder. “PLEAD TO ME.”
“Quick, students!” Starchman called out, ushering survivors to his side. He’d doffed his tie to wear it as a headband and was climbing up a shelf to reach the ceiling. “Into the vents! Grab as many classics as you can! If books must burn, let still more hide within the shadows that the mournful pyre casts! Mankind cannot withstand a second Alexandria!”
“Book the eighth grader for truancy without a hall pass... and piracy,” the President said, glancing coldly at the anime website on Isaac’s abandoned computer. “I want the charges to stick.”
“I SUPPORT THE OFFICIAL RELEASE!! I SWEAR!!” squealed Isaac, but his words fell on deaf ears.
There was no stopping what was now unfolding all across the school.