Tainted Gestalt: Rosario + Vampire

So here he was, having failed his high school exams. On his way to a school in the middle of nowhere that his parents somehow happened upon. It was kind of weird that he was the only one on the bus, and the name of the school was a bit odd as well… But hey, just because the location was a bit creepy and there was something peculiar about the driver -

“Are you the student enrolling at Youkai Academy?” the driver asked, with a voice that sounded like it had died a thousand years ago, been sealed up inside a tomb and only yesterday seen the light of day for the first time since.

He nodded nervously in response. Being a rather average, mediocre boy, well, he didn’t see how it would be possible for him to make friends easily at this place. Who knew what the students were like? For all he knew, the bullies here were real monsters!

“You had best prepare yourself,” the driver cackled. “When we come out of this looooong tunnel we’ll be at the school!”

A shiver shot through the boy when he noticed the peculiar gleam in the driver’s eye. Not an entirely unreasonable fear given the man’s behaviour and his smile that would send the most drunken brawler screaming for the hills. There was little opportunity to consider this, however, as to his increasing terror the bus had arrived in a mockery of the Transylvanian cliche.

The worst Hollywood sets were not so brazen. Perpetually dead trees that looked as though they were allergic to leaves, instead preferring the company of crows who in turn perched menacingly upon the branches. There was a cliff overlooking a boundless ocean. An English Victorian house looming on the horizon with an ominous thunderbollot reaching down from the sky at the very first glance. Animal skulls lining the road. Scarecrows with pumpkin heads. A creepy aura oozed from every square inch of this place, and now he was wondering exactly what he had brought himself into. It was as though the tunnel had been a gateway to another world!

“It looks like a haunted mansion from top to bottom,” he sighed, staring at the only building anywhere in sight. “I don’t like this place. I should - ow!”

He’d stepped on something. Something very hard, with a sharp corner that stuck right into the sole of his foot. Tsukune Aono checked his foot and barely had time to pick up the strange cube out of the ground before a cute girl in a bicycle barrelled into him, leaving them both lying in the dirt….

Eight seemingly disconnected people each finding an eighth of one of the most powerful artefacts ever to exist. Strewn across eight dimensions, it is easy to see how one might come to the erroneous conclusion that these eight remain separated from one another…

Except that this is no longer true. It was no longer true from the very moment that they first touched that seemingly innocent if slightly curious container of cosmic power. Though it be separated by issue of dimensions, space and the dimensions within space, those eight cubes were once part of the same whole, and to this instant remain so.

These eight people and their eight strange lives were thus irrevocably intertwined. These eight were about to become a tremendous inadvertent influence upon one another’s life. For better or for worse.

*written by Lumitiel