Jed was in bliss over slurping the smoothie contents of his cup; it was a heavenly feeling, especially after a burst of argument and during a school weekday. However, he noticed something in his hair, with two hair strands tangled in his vision. Just constantly looking through this unequal flaw in his hairstyle bothered his mind so much that he needed to look in a mirror; any mirror would do.
"Guys, bad news. This is really bad, so bad..." he said to the other two.
"Huh? What is it?!" Marlo asked, alarmed by his words.
"Yeah, Jed. What's gotten into you?" Tyraun said with worry.
"One of my hair strands on my head is not in its proper place. I need to fix this monstrosity before I get crazy," Jed said. "I have to go to the bathroom on the ground floor, cuz I heard it's the cleanest out of all the other bathrooms in this mall."
"So...? It's nothing super bad or anything like that?" Tyraun asked.
Marlo was not amused, judging by his scrunched-up eyes. "Oh my god—just get out of here before I punch you to death. You sound like Bobby Belarus with his obsession over appearance."
"Hey! That's way too low. Unlike him, I actually care about being decent in front of people, not wearing too tacky clothing. Now, if you don't mind, I gotta zoom out to style my Niles."
"Niles?" Marlo tried to ask, but Jed rushed out of the smoothie stand's seating area, not leaving a second wasted as he practically ran through the escalator, skipping a couple of steps before he realized that he was using the wrong escalator. The people staying still in their steps were rising towards him. Jed had many close calls when approaching them, where he had to approach them with contortions to narrowly avoid hitting them with his flailing body parts.
By the time he got to the bathroom on the ground floor, he went inside with the creaking door with the blue male-shaped body sign in the middle.
* * *
Nate Elfirm sat right in the middle, where Sam and Cloey were on his left, then Sheila and Manson on his right. He would have to ask two of them to move over if needed to get extra condiments or something like that.
Nate thought about the different hijinks Jed and his friends were now up to, as he saw a poor girl get a door slammed to her face by the three. The one person who proceeded to go check on her was Tyraun, but even he was distracted by something on top of him. Probably to check on the vents since it was getting a little heated up when around hot pizza that just came from the oven itself.
Nate went ahead and ate his portion of his pizza; typically, for him, he eats the crust first and does not leave it out like Manson. Sam would eat the leftovers since it was basically almost impossible for him to stop eating if it was in his sight; it's on target.
After getting some bites on his plain cheese, he felt a tug on his shirt from his right. It was Sheila who was pulling on his shirt. She looked a bit tense with her arms tucked between her knees.
"Er—Nate...?" she said quietly. "Can I ask you a favor right now?"
"Um, sure. What's up? Is it about your pizza again?"
"Not exactly." Sheila clasped her hands, and she tried to look away as she prepared to utter something so minuscule. "I need to... I have to... I need someone to accompany me to the women's bathroom..."
"Uh...? Is that it? Why not go there yourself?" Nate asked with his eyebrow raised.
"I know it is going to inconvenience you, but with the number of visitors to this mall, with no signs of it decreasing, I need someone to wait while I go to the restroom," Sheila stated.
"Well, I understand that, but why me specifically, not someone like Sam?"
"Sam's too busy with the pizza and talking with Cloey. Manson is preoccupied with staring at his video game. For you, though, you're pretty capable and more focused than the other two guys. I trust that you will handle what might happen while I'm inside."
"H-hey, don't paint me like I'm some sort of master class protector. Even if you say all that good stuff about me, you're probably just making me feel better about myself, and that doesn't mean the other guys are inferior," Nate tried to explain.
"Let's get going then, let's prove if you're up to the task of accompanying me to the bathroom..."
With no other choice, besides looking down at his empty plate devoid of pizza, thanks to Sam Davis and his voracious appetite, Nate got up from his seat as Sheila followed up. The rest of the group looked at the two with curiosity.
"Hey, you guys going somewhere?" Manson questioned.
"Yeah, just going for a bathroom break. We'll be back in a sec, don't you worry," Nate reassured.
Sam had the face that wanted to get the chance to say something lightheartedly and mischievously. "Oooooh, Nate and Cloey going together? You sure it's just a bathroom break? Or something even more risky, like—"
"Oh, stop it, you joking boy..." Cloey interrupted, "... The two of them are nothing like that; they're just friends enjoying their company who will help each other always."
"Kinda weird to be thinkin' like that to begin with," Manson said.
"Anyway, I hope you two will have a good journey to the bathroom," Cloey happily said.
Jeez, Cloey, you think it is some big fantasy adventure to the wonderful place called the bottom floor girls' restroom in Honoway Mall. Maybe you have been reading too many of your cozy medieval fantasy classic novels in your free time.
Nate and Sheila departed from the store and went down the escalator, where the two of them witnessed Tyraun and Marlo hovering around some poor smoothie stand worker as they munch on their breaded snack bites.
* * *
Jed entered the men's restroom. Seeing as no one else was in the stalls, he faced towards a mirror with a hair comb from his pocket. The bathroom itself was dirtier than ever.
"Time to get my hair all propped up; can't get it dirty at all," he said. "I could buy some more hair gel. I'll have to ask one of the guys for some money, though."
As he propped each hair strand, one strand per minute, he heard something behind him.
A splash had been heard, with the water trickling down from the toilet onto the floor. Jed was disgusted by whoever was inside the toilet.
"Uh... Hey man, you mind being a bit quieter there? No one here in Honoway wants to hear that at all."
No response came from the stall. Jed shrugged and returned to take care of his hair. A puddle of toilet water slowly formed on the floor, reaching halfway to Jed. He backed away, almost halfway from standing in the sink.
"Aw, sick! Gross, dude, what the hell?" he knocked on the stall door, expecting an answer to call out to him, but still no response had been made.
Realizing it was futile to keep going with this, Jed decided to fix his hair later in another bathroom. He carefully circumvented the puddle, daring the water not to touch a single part of his clean shoes.
Next to the exit was the janitor door flinging open, startling Jed as he landed on his butt. The various items in the janitor closet-mops, buckets, repair tools, and an entire replacement door-landed in front of the exit, blocking
A noise hummed over in the ceiling. Looking up with widened eyes, Jed was exasperated by what was going on. "Seriously, what is going on in this bathroom?"
Not just the stalls or the sinks, but the whole bathroom was shaking, to the point where Jed could not properly maintain his balance. The floor made him gravitate to the floor.
Jed looked around and saw some slimy substance that was being painted slowly down from some cracks in the wall.
"Oh my god, it's an earthquake! I gotta duck and cover before my head gets split open!" he fearfully shouted, as he tried to hide under the sink, with the slippery floors not helping things for one bit.
The rumbling persisted, and the pipes also made a whooshing noise, eventually bursting with water. One pipe was bent and sprayed water right into Jed's gaping mouth, making him cough and shout in disgust.
As he tried to wipe off the water that had invaded the dryness of his clothes, he found the sticky substance that was originally from the floor splotched on his hands. The sticky goo spread itself similarly to a smooth liquid, but when Jed tried to rub it off his arm, the goo persisted on his arm like it was someone so clingy that you could never really get off their tracks.
The blue slime kept filling up with the rumbles around the room, rising in intensity. Jed tried to budge out of his encasement, but it was not use. The slime had already hardened and trapped the boy in a stiff position, with the blue slime pooling up in the bathroom until it was a pool ready for a swim.
"Help! Someone help me! I'm in the bathroom, Tyraun! Marlo!" Jed desperately called out from beyond the boys' bathroom. He hoped that his voice would reach an ear nearby, and that person would be kind and brave enough to save him from this supernatural peril before he got seriously hurt, or something worse, like getting killed.
But it was no use; whatever gods Jed thought were up there didn't listen to his cries, and the room contorted itself until it couldn't be called a bathroom anymore, just a slimy mess of broken debris; the pieces of the door stall circled like some sort of creature's nest.
"NO! I don't want to end up as trash! I don't want to be kiiiiiillllleddd!" he cried out for one final time before he was grabbed by something... some kind of rope wrapped itself around his ankle and pulled him towards a crack in the bathroom walls.
The grip on his leg was firm, even with Jed's leg encased in hardened blue slime; it could be felt down to his bare legs. After a few nudges and pulls, Jed was between two walls after he was forcefully pulled into the wall's crack, causing tension in his joints, almost to the point that he felt burns.
Then there he was, lying still inside the walls of the bathroom. Unable to call out with his body trapped in the hardened slime. Jed's eyes drooped, and his breathing relaxed at a slow rate. The whole thing happened with Nate and Sheila on the other side of the bathroom door, where they were unaware of what transpired.
* * *
Nate waited by the chairs connected to the wall with his thumbs twirling against each other in a battle of death. After getting bored with doing the same thing over and over again, he decided to trail his eyes through each person and take mental notes on their style of clothing if it was enough to deter against the unwavering will of early autumn.
Thinking of the hot water and seeing Marlo with his friends over at the smoothie stand made Nate's mouth salivate. Just something cold to drink would be enough to quench his thirst from the hot cheese pizza from earlier.
"Maybe a sip or two at the water fountain would get my mind out of this heat funk."
So he decided to get up and walk towards the water fountain, hoping that it was at least sanitary compared to the rumors he heard about the ground floor bathrooms being as untidy as the ones in Standart High.
The constant flow of water hitting the metal surface was constant as Nate took a sip of the tasteless fluid, until that consistent noise was broken by something else.
A large rumble made itself heard to Nate's ear. Aware, he glanced over to the boys' bathroom next to the girls. Nothing he saw was unusual until he saw some sort of liquid dripping from the hinges and on top of the door. Muffled sounds from inside also escaped through the door, barely audible to a human.
Nate stared at the bathroom door, his head tilted in confusion as he examined the contents covering its front. "Eugh... What is this stuff...?"
Nate tried to touch it and let it sit on his index finger. The texture was really slippery, but after a short second or two, the substance immediately became much more sticky, like a stick of gum that went past its expiration date.
His fatal flaw told him to check what was inside that was making this slime; the enemy of his mind, called curiosity, persuaded him to open the door. And so he did, reaffirming himself that Sheila would be okay if he took a look inside the bathroom without fuss. Nate peered through the door. He expected the automatic low-cost lights to illuminate the room inside, but instead, darkness still lived inside, away from the shining light of Honoway Mall's main attractions.
Nate pulled out his phone from his back pocket and switched it to flashlight mode. His device was low on battery, so the light wasn't all that bright, but it was enough to illuminate what was in front of him for a few feet.
He carefully stepped inside, and what followed was spine-tingling. Nate's foot, as he placed it on the bathroom floor, was instantaneously covered with a cold fluid of some kind, as it reached above his socks and went inside his shoes.
"Gross, get this off me," Nate groaned. He was sure that it was from an overflowing toilet, with the water from inside making a large puddle on the floor, causing him to almost retch in disgust, although no particular smell reached his nostrils.
He tried to pull away from the floor, but the slimy stuff seemed to have a mind of its own as it pulled Nate towards the darkness of the room. He managed to stay upright on his feet, preventing himself from landing on the floor body-wide. Right as he steadied himself on his two feet, he pointed his phone's flashlight at his surroundings. The bathroom was totally messed up.
Aside from the blue slime covering most of the room, the sinks were smashed up with their ceramic pieces on the floor. The mirrors didn't have their reflective surfaces anymore, now showing shattered portions that seemed to be visual nonsense. The stalls and their toilets were not clumped together, similar to a preschooler's attempt at arts and crafts, only to be a spiky ball of failed experiments glued together.
Nate's heart rate went up as he witnessed the chaos that traveled in the room, which even a miniature tornado that somehow formed seemed remotely plausible.
Realizing that this bathroom wasn't the normal bathroom that Honoway had, evident by the blue slime that covered the whole bathroom floor as he shone with his phone's flashlight, Nate tried to get out of the bathroom, but as he attempted to pull away, he was unable to move even an inch with his foot.
Nate tried to call his friends. He reached for the app to dial their number, but he never got the chance. Why? Because the fingers on his hands were stuck to the phone's screen. Quad Four's assistance was only a few taps away, but his movement was stopped.
"No! Dang it! When I touched the slime on the door from outside, it was still slippery like water. Why did it stick now?"
He then finally had a hunch about why this was happening as he desperately tried to get the hardened slime off. The slime that turns sticky to cause even instant immobilization, that was definitely not normal. It might even be called something unusual within the city of Standart. As this bathroom's current look might be the work of a Faden. A Faden in Honoway Mall, under the nose of its many visitors, until Nate Elfirm unknowingly stepped into its frightful domain.