Luck is indeed a lady tonight.

The sound of Vanessa's gunshot rang out with a loud, metallic clang as John's attention was immediately drawn to the shed again where Mary still sat inside, curled up in a little ball with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. The Hispanic cheerleader shook as she tried to stay still and kept her eyes squeezed shut... but she was moving. The metal ringing noise in the air drew John's attention up above Mary to the spot where the bullet had actually hit, and he swallowed dryly when he finally found the little round hole in the metal wall behind the cheerleader. A soft groan slipped out of Vanessa as she too stared at the spot she had hit above Mary's head and then lifted the gun up again.

"I missed!" she exclaimed as she pointed the weapon at Maryagain, but John quickly snatched it out of her hands before she could fire it for a second time. Vanessa's velvety laugh echoed across the field as she watched John take the gun... and then throw it as far away from them as he could before he turned back to Vanessa shouting.

"ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR GODDAMN MIND?!" he shouted, and on the edge of his vision, John watched as Frank slowly shook himself awake at the sound of a gunshot. The football player swayed as he managed to push up onto his hands and knees, but John didn't feel like Frank was necessarily the dangerous one anymore. At least in Frank's case, all John needed to do was take away that last hit point to see him drop back down into the dirt again. Vanessa didn't even bother to slap John in response; as much as he hated to admit it, she was smarter than that. She didn't even need to hit him to steal his thunder away again.

"Who is Grace?" she asked with another smirk and watched as John's face fell again. He turned to look away from her before the conversation could continue down that direction, but Vanessa already had her claws in enough to know that the information was important. "Johnny boy... look at me." Even with the command, she didn't wait until he obeyed. She simply stepped into his line of sight. "This is my world. Do you understand? You don't do anything that I don't want you to here. No one does." Vanessa paused for one long second and spoke up loud enough for everyone left on the football field to hear her. "You don't even get a crush on somebody without my permission." The last two words came out of Vanessa in the form of a guttural growl, driving her point home before her tone took on it's usual peppy... pompous attitude again. They stood there for a couple seconds more as Vanessa told Frank to get to his feet... and then waved goodbye to the nerd that she had been bullying for most of his life. "Toodaloo, Johnny."

John didn't move after she left. He just stood there... staring at Mary through the doorway in the shed as she finally started to break down and buried her face into the gym mats beneath her. Her torso heaved with each sobbing breath while John tried to figure out what it was he was supposed to do... and then tried to make his body move so that he could actually do it. After a little while, a small bead of worry rose up in his chest when he remembered that someone had probably heard the shot that Vanessa had fired. He glanced around, checking quickly in every direction he could for witnesses. For the most part, the field was clear. He could see the blinds and curtains of windows that were closed off to John, keeping the majority of the school from looking outside at him, but he figured that most of them probably just went back to their schoolwork when they had seen Vanessa out there. Many of the students and faculty were probably too cowed to do anything by that point, and if not, then they were probably hiding at the idea of a possible shooter going through the school.

The rest of the equipment sheds that had been left outside the school were simply empty and dark while the nearby parking lot seemed devoid of life. Even the streets outside the Ashcroft school grounds were barren and empty. The only face that John ever actually found staring down at him from the rooftop above was Mrs. Wentworth's. She didn't say or do anything to John as soon as he noticed her. She just turned around and walked away, leaving the Gamer even more annoyed about the fact that Vanessa and Frank had just gotten away with what they had done. The football field emptied... and John finally began his hesitant journey into the shed to try and help Mary.

A strange part of him still felt worried that she might try to yell at him or attack him when he moved closer to her, like she used to do back before John had received his powers... but Mary didn't even register his approach. She barely even noticed it when John took off the red jacket he had stolen from the mall to try and replace part of his lost school uniform, and then she jumped and screamed again when he put it on her. His sudden touch drove her into retreating away from the Gamer and into one of the nearby corners to hide while he tried to calm her and reassure Mary that it was only him. She stopped crying almost immediately, but only so that she could keep her eyes on John as he sat there with her until her breathing seemed to calm down somewhat.

Eventually, John just gave up on his attempt to go to school. The morning had already been hectic enough, and there were more important things calling for his attention at that moment, mainly Mary. He pulled out his phone while she was still cautiously watching him and quickly went to work typing on it. After he had sent his first message, Mary finally spoke up.

"W-what are you doing?" Her voice was weaker than he could ever remember it being, dry and hoarse like she had been screaming all day. John glanced up at her as slowly as he could manage, but Mary still pushed back further into the corner when he looked at her. Her gaze met his and held it for a surprising amount of time, but the change in his actions didn't shake the worry or fear from her expression. "Y-you can't tell anyone tha-"

"I'm not. I'm messaging a friend and telling her to come pick us up," John interrupted her before she had to finish her sentence and watched as Mary closed her mouth... and then lifted his jacket all the way up to her eyes, hiding everything from her nose down in his red coat. He glanced around the room a few times and gradually went around to pick up the belongings that had been stripped from Mary and tossed aside before he finally got a reply from Robyn telling him that she was on her way. Over the next few minutes he managed to gather everything that he thought belonged to Mary including a small pink thong, her own personal Ashcroft jacket which had been cut open on both the back and front with a nearby knife, her backpack, and her phone, which had been thrown on the ground and smashed under someone's foot.

He tucked as much of her stuff into her backpack as he could, struggling to make some of it fit with all of the schoolwork and books that were already inside it... and blinked when his fingers thumbed across a familiar leather collar that had been left inside the bag. After a little while longer had passed, John received another text from Robyn telling him that she had arrived, and as carefully as he could manage, he picked up the bag and began trying to lead Mary out of the shed. The first part was easy. Once he told her that the ride was here, Mary seemed more than eager to get away from the place where she had been attacked. Getting her to move across the football field was the hard part.

Mary's instinct from the very beginning was to step away from any person who dared to step anywhere near her. It made it hard for John to try and support her or point her in the direction of Robyn's car when Mary was constantly trying to take a step back and away from him. She tried to follow, to trust him when he told her that he was trying to get her out of there, but it took a while before they finally got to Robyn's 'Deuce.' It definitely didn't help that she had to squeeze past John while he held the door open for her just to try and get into the back seat of the car. It didn't have any doors for the back seats, making it so additional passengers had to practically climb around the car just to get into the back.

When they were finally inside though, Mary immediately found a way to distract herself through conversation. She introduced herself to Robyn, who silently nodded a greeting back at the other girl while Mary tried to zip up John's jacket and brush the hair out of her face to make herself more presentable before John had finally closed the car door behind himself. Out of curiosity, he took a brief glance around the parking lot to see if he could find June's car while he was still there, but the art teacher was already long gone.

"D-do you have a robot arm?" Mary asked once the car had finally started, and both John and Robyn shared a surprised look. He wasn't sure what it was that he was expecting, but a part of John had felt like the arm simply wouldn't have been visible to other people. He thought that maybe it had been hidden in an illusion for regular people so that Robyn at least looked like any other average person when she walked by them.

"Uhh... yeah." A succinct answer. Robyn almost let the conversation end right there before she saw the look on John's face, and then she relented and let herself be roped into the conversation. "A childhood friend went out of her way to make it for me after I lost the original one a while back."

"Oh..." There was a slight pause as John watched the corners of Mary's lips curl up into the barest traces of a smile when she heard that, and then she continued. "That's sweet. H-how did you lose it?" Robyn tensed and then relaxed so quickly that John almost missed it. Mary missed it completely. The blonde woman swallowed softly as she pulled the car out of the parking lot and took off down the road with a loud revving noise.

"I lost it to a monster," she said, and John almost choked when she said that so easily. Mary didn't even blink at how Robyn 'phrased her answer'. "A real nightmare that I had the misfortune of meeting during a tour in Iraq." Just like that, the atmosphere in the vehicle dropped again. The mention of monsters, war, and fighting stole away any pretense of normality that the three of them had had and left the deuce shrouded in silence. John watched as Mary slowly lost the clarity in her gaze at the mention of a monster, and as the seconds passed, she began to retreat back into the comfort of his jacket again, hiding her face from sight. Robyn clenched her hands at the steering wheel as they all sat there, clearly focused on another topic while John just watched the two of them. After what he had seen Robyn do to the locker at his school with her hammer, he was surprised to find out that she wasn't bending or breaking the steering wheel as she squeezed it. Eventually, John tried to break the silence himself.

"Do you ever miss it?" He cocked an eyebrow at Robyn and watched as her eyes widened slightly and turned to look at him. "Your arm, I mean," he said, and she followed his gaze to the strangely dexterous metal fingers that began rhythmically tapping on the dashboard. After a moment, she smiled at him.

"You know me..." she said, and John resisted the urge to shake his head. That wasn't true. He didn't know her at all. That was part of why he was asking her the question in the first place. "...I'm a fan of the classics." Both John and Mary smiled back at her at that. "Though... this one does have its own upsides." Without breaking eye contact with John, Robyn held up her and pointed to the ceiling. At first, nothing happened. John just sat there watching as she held a finger aloft and grinned at him... then finally, a short click could be heard throughout the car before her finger began to subtly vibrate and pulse as the two of them stared at Robyn. John blushed almost immediately, turning his head to look away while a little giggle slipped out of Mary from the backseat. Robyn simply laughed at their reactions.

"That's definitely useful," the Hispanic cheerleader conceded, deepening John's blush before Robyn turned to look back at her.

"I thought so," she said and then abruptly stopped the vibrations. "Waitwaitwait. I can do one better," Robyn said and then stopped to take a deep breath. Her brow furrowed as she stared at her hand, letting her concentration and suspense build as the three of them sat at a stoplight... and with a flick of her hand, she started it up again. "Go Go Gidget, Vibrator!" Her finger started to buzz. John buried his face into his hands while Mary started giggling again.

"Oh dear god..." John mumbled under a heavy sigh and shook slightly as Robyn elbowed him in the side as if to prod the laughter out of it.

"Whaaat? You didn't like it?" she asked, and John simply shook his head. "I thought you were a video game nerd."

"That's mostly just a cartoons reference. One that you didn't even reference correctly. It's Gadget, not Gidget." Again, Mary giggled as John tried to explain the joke to her. It took a while, with John going off on a tangent to try and explain where the 'Gadget' part of the catch phrase came from, but Robyn didn't care enough to listen.

"But you understood it, right?" Eventually she just got sick of the conversation and cut straight to the point. John nodded and tried to bring her back on topic, but she ended it there. "Eh, close enough then. Hey, where am I going here? I don't want to just drive around all day."

"Not home," Mary interjected into the conversation before John could answer. "My 'roomie' is another cheerleader and I don't want anything to do with Ashcroft right now."

"Where do you want to go?" John raised an eyebrow at Mary and watched as she hid in his jacket again. She didn't say anything. When he tried to bring up the possibility of the police department she just shook her head at him. "Do you have anywhere else to go?" Again, she didn't answer him.

The car rumbled to a stop at another stoplight and Robyn adjusted one of her rear view mirrors to look at Mary. A stranger honked at the three of them from a couple rows back, but they ignored whoever it was. Eventually, when the light turned green again, Robyn made the decision for her.

"She can stay with me. I've got the room for her and I could definitely use the company." Robyn's hands clenched at the steering wheel again as she spoke. Mary blushed and muttered something to try and excuse her from that responsibility, but Robyn simply ignored it. "Now that that's decided..." She turned down another road to start heading up to the northern part of the city, and John blinked as he realized that he was going to be able to see Robyn's house. "... we need to talk about Otrov." This time John actually did **** on his surprise. He wasn't sure how he managed it, but after she finished talking, John had to spend a few minutes coughing to clear his throat. Robyn merely spared a glance back at Mary before she gave John a hesitant glance. "Do you trust her?"

John looked back and forth between Robyn and Mary. Mary was trying to avoid his gaze, but it was clear from how she kept glancing that she was trying to listen intently to what it was that they were saying. He couldn't see any harm in at least talking about it. If he absolutely needed to, then John figured he could just pass off the conversation as something geeky... so he nodded.

"Yeah, I trust her. I haven't told her anything, but it should be fine..." he said, and despite having made his decision, he started wringing his hands over his lap.

"Good, then tell me everything that happened. I want to know where you were and what you were doing when Otrov attacked you," she said, her tone implied it was more of an order than an actual request, so he told her. He walked her through the events of what happened in the mall after he had separated from Robyn and mentioned how he stumbled into Michel again just as he had been about to leave, and left Robyn momentarily confused when he mentioned about how both Michel and John talked for a moment, but she caught on when he explained that he found an Illusioned status effect on Otrov. She swore under her breath at the implication that Otrov could have been using illusions to hide like that. He told her about how she stabbed him and he barely escaped from whatever poison she had put on her daggers, but there wasn't much more information to give her than that. At least... not anything that he necessarily wanted her to know about. She didn't seem interested in the Mana tanks he had seen after he had passed out, she just dismissed it as a part of a nightmare that he had directly after being attacked, so he dismissed it too.

He didn't bring up the kingdom itself or the time that he had spent with the goddess, Hestia. There wasn't any benefit that came from telling her about the whole other world that he had run across, so he decided to try and keep it secret... at least just for a little while longer.

Thinking about the kingdom did bring up a few other problems that John had yet to address, though. His focus on Mary and Otrov was split as his attention gradually shifted over to past thoughts he had had about his **** Urga... and the warning that Hestia gave him about his necromancy items. Hestia had told him that the items were dangerous, that they had a habit of corrupting people who held onto them, and nearly tried to ask Robyn about disposing of them. He would have done it... if not for the fact that his typical gaming habits arose just as he had been about to open his mouth.

If he got rid of those items now, then he could have been in trouble if he needed them later... right? Keeping them would have merely acted as a... safeguard against future problems. Making that decision just left the problem he was having with Urga, though, and he didn't know where it was that he was supposed to start at with that.

"Do you..." he paused slightly and watched as Robyn lazily glanced in his direction without even turning her head. "Do you know what it takes to heal someone from blindness?" The blonde sighed and shifted slightly in her seat. The two of them both spared a look to check on Mary as she continued to sit silently through the new topic of conversation, but she didn't even look back. She seemed more focused on staring out the window than paying attention to what the two of them were talking about. A part of John wondered if she had just dismissed it as nerdy video game jargon or she was trying to look like she wasn't eavesdropping on their conversation.

"Is it natural blindness or caused magically?" Robyn asked. Mary didn't even flinch at the mention of magic, she just kept staring out the window like the conversation didn't even interest her.

"Magically... necromancy, specifically. A rock or something cast some kind of blindness spell on another creature the last time I went into that kingdom we were talking about and it has been blind since." John didn't even get to finish talking before Robyn frowned at what he was saying. The car passed into a district of the city that had been known as 'Sunset' and then turned down a few more streets before Robyn casually began to bring the car to a gradual halt.

"You might be out of luck if it's necromancy. There are a few groups out there that might be able to help you with such a thing, but the most prominent one in this area would be the Golden Rose... with Moira gone though, I don't know how much luck you'll have with something like that. Even with her here, wounds taken from necromancy spells usually leave scars on the body and the soul, and I don't think that there is anything that can be done for wounds that are left on the soul." Mary’s head flicked over to stare at the two of them when Robyn mentioned the redheaded Warden of the Golden Rose by name, her eyes wide and unblinking as they calmly mentioned someone that she would have thought to have never associated with video games in the past. John's shoulders and head dropped in defeat as Robyn gave him one of the answers that he had been dreading the most for Urga's situation since the fight in Bleakfield had happened.

The Orc was going to stay blind.