Though at first glance they seem to be scattered randomly throughout the space, after a moment’s examination you can see that each is labeled with a letter of the alphabet in an ornate hand script, and they appear to be positioned in roughly alphabetical order.
On a whim you begin with “L,” and pry off the cardboard lid of the box. To your surprise, the very first folder in the box has your name, Percy Lewis, calligraphed in neat bold script on the tab.
“What in Camelot!” you breathe loudly, wide-eyed, and then abruptly think to yourself, That definitely doesn’t work as a cuss. Dust swirls up as you drop the box lid on the wooden attic floor. Hurriedly opening the folder, you see that the top sheet of paper inside appears to be a sort of transcript of your education, illustrating your grades, your extracurriculars, and a handful of notes about your salient adventures in the high school, in the same precise handwritten script. Stamped in the corner is some kind of small symbol which resembles an eye within a triangle. Other sheets wind up being in-depth notes of your progress and involvement in several of your more advanced classes in math and the sciences. “Who’s watching me so closely?!” you exclaim softly, pulling out the next folder.
It’s a similar account as the last, this time for a student named Angel La Cote, a girl you barely know from the grade below you. Rummaging through several more folders, you gradually realize that the box appears to contain notes regarding a surveillance scheme of impressive scope, covering all of the smartest students who attended the school for the last 30 or so years. Each of the papers is stamped with that symbol, the eye within the triangle.
Whoever’s made these notes, they have an incredible attention to detail, and a power to observe the student body which you would have previously thought impossible. What’s more, most of the folders include a section labeled “Sinister Agenda,” which plainly references each student by name, but is otherwise evidently encoded with some kind of cipher. Although you pride yourself on your puzzle-solving skills, you feel too vulnerable here, elbow deep in highly clandestine files, to give the cipher the attention it requires. Nevertheless, you get the impression that some mysterious group has a nefarious purpose in mind for each of the students contained in this file, and may be shaping their education toward giving them the ideal skill set to fulfill that purpose.
Who is this secret society, and what are they doing to shape ME?! you wonder, and How many others are they affecting this way?, before your darting gaze runs over the lid that you dropped on the floor earlier. In the yellowish afternoon light, you see another label that you’d missed when you removed it. It reads, clearly, “Contents Top Secret, for Privileged of the Order ONLY. Not to be opened upon pain of instant and miserable death.”
“Oh good,” you say aloud, before clapping your hands over your mouth. If someone’s observing all the students, am I being observed right now? Ice shoots through your veins and you hastily replace the student files, cover the box, and flee back down the steps, closing the trap door behind you.
Pleading sickness, you leave school immediately and go home. You bury yourself under the covers of your bed and plot your next move. Upon consideration, you realize there’s very little you can do without alerting whoever or whatever is watching you in secret, and you decide that’s a risk you’re not willing to take. Grimly you vow to continue your schooling as quietly as possible, and to escape whatever plot revolves around you, just as soon as you can get some kind of idea what it is.
The End.
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