'mad world [Maddy]

[Jessica Air]

Jess slammed the door into the learning support room with as much strength as she could muster, hoping stuff would fall off the bookshelves, or the plaster would crack. After waiting expectantly for a minute, she threw herself down at the small table, her laptop case beside her, and unfolded the creased piece of paper. She stared at it for a minute, then sighed and pushed if away. Maybe one of the others could read it. It had been stuck to the door of the LS room, hand-written. The fact that her teacher was idiotic enough to leave them a note infuriated her, causing her vicious attack to the doorframe.

Stretching her legs out beneath the table, she wondered who would be joining her. It was a lesson for dyslexics only, which really annoyed Jess. It was separating them from the rest of the world, shouldn't that be illegal?

After four seconds with no entertainment passed, Jessica poked the tape player that was in the middle of the round table. Where was the teacher, anyway? And her partner? As she pressed 'play', the triangle shaped symbol, the door swung open behind her as a voice boomed out of the speakers. Hurriedly, she stopped the tape mid-word and turned the volume down, giving Maddy a glare over her shoulder. "Cody isn't here. What does this say?" Waving the scrap of paper around, she pressed play again, rolling her eyes at the cheesy recording that played. It was clearly the voice of the special needs teacher, but he had deepened it to sound like someone in an advert or something. There was a high-pitched giggle in the background; a girl.

"Welcome to... Um, the... Learning Support room of horrors!" There was some 'evil' laughter, then a cough. "Your teacher -may I say, a very handsome man- is dead. You will receive no help from him for the duration of the exercise. The doors are locked -step away from them, Maddy, you'll be electrocuted and get a failing grade." The irritating giggle cane again. "Shut up, Mia! Anyway. To escape the room, you must piece together all the clues by the time I -and my wonderful assistant- come back. Failure to do so will result in a D. I mean, torture by...extra maths. Hint: The first thing you need to do is read the note that was stuck to the door, assuming that Jess didn't eat it upon arrival."

Jess stared, open-mouthed at the cassette player. "Maddox, Jessica, enjoy your...slow death. Also known as a lesson." There was a burst of laughter, presumably from 'Mia', and the tape ended. Slowly, Jess turned to Maddy. "Is he serious? This is fucking ridiculous." Standing, she headed upwards the door. "He's such a loser!"

[Maddox Greydon]

Maddy bounced - quite literally, jumping down several steps at a time - down the stairs towards the learning support classroom, hoping Cody would be in a good mood today. It really would be a shame if he got in trouble, but it was OK. He didn't mind too much. After all, he was technically allowed to be like this, seeing as he had a real-life, actual condition that gave him a permit - although it didn't - to be happy. Very happy. He wondered what he'd be like if he wasn't bipolar. Boring, probably. Or maybe he'd be like one of those normal people. No, wait, he had another label, didn't he- he fell the last few steps, landing in a crumpled heap on the floor and springing up again straight away. He was falling over a lot these days. Maybe it was the withdrawal? His hands were shaking, he noticed, but he wasn't sure whether that was because he wanted drugs and sex and a game of poker or because he just had so much goddamn, motherfucking energy. God, that was a lot of swearwords. Not really, actually, but he'd thought them so fast that they seemed like a lot. Somehow, that felt odd. Surely thinking them fast would make them seem like less, not more?

Oh, well. He was at the learning support room now, so it was all good. He wasn't allowed to swear in front of Cody, which meant he had to stop thinking swearwords. No, wait. He didn't, not really. Cody couldn't read minds. Dr Ivrie could, though... no, he couldn't, he'd said. Maybe he was lying. Maybe he couldn't, but Cody could. Either way, it was best not to think them, because the things Maddox thought often came out of his mouth, which was really bad in some situations, although people generally didn't seem to mind... he realised he was muttering to himself, so fast the words came out in a blur, and gave Jess, already sat there looking annoyed, a cheesy grin.

When she got up to leave, he jumped towards her and whipped the paper out of her hands. "Hang on a minute, let me read it," he told her, although the words came out more like: 'ha'mint, le'ead't', due to the fact that his mind appeared to be working far faster than his mind. He read the sheet over several times, frowning, turned it upside down, still couldn't make any sense of it, and back again. Then his expression cleared and he smiled, the words suddenly making sense to him. "It says," he began, "Look... in the cupboard," 'Loo' inna cupboard'. He made his way to the cupboard and opened it, seeing another brightly coloured sticky note.

[Jessica Air]

Jess edged away from Maddy, giving him her best 'are you insane?' look as she did so. Had he just spoken in English? "Look, for a dyslexic, I have brilliant auditory processing, so it's you that's fucked up. What the fuck did you just say?" There was unnecessary double use of the word fuck there, but Jess dismissed it. After all, she'd never claimed she was a writer. Or a...talker, whatever the word was. She'd relinquished the paper easily, not wanting to annoy Maddy, or rather, the duplicate of Maddy who appeared to be completely insane.

He was helpful, at least, she realized. If it wasn't for him...okay, she'd have left and have been halfway back to her dorm, but if she'd cared about the stupid exercise, he'd be hopeful to have around, due to the fact that he could read. A bit. "I know what it says," she snapped, grabbing the paper back and glaring at it, trying to make the incompressible tangle of black lines come together to form words. It didn't work, but she stared at it for a minute, pretending that she'd understood. It was stupid, anyway; what was the point of her being there, when Maddy was the only one of them that could read?

The other boy knew that she couldn't read or write (well, a little bit, but it was hard) from their previous sessions, but it was still humiliating. Jess was used to vehemently denying the mere idea that she couldn't read; it had been a long time since she'd willingly admitted it. Following Maddy, she grabbed the sticky note -it was a green one, which was the best color for her- and glared at it, not letting Maddox see. "What's the point of this?" she demanded, turning and glaring at him. "It's stup- oh, it's an arrow." Realizing that her words might not make complete sense, she waved the piece of paper. "It's pointing down." Jess looked down, seeing another tape recorder by her feet. Rolling her eyes, she hit the play button again, sighing as she heard Cody's voice boom out.

"You made it! I mean...you made it." His voice turned sinister, or, Cody attempting to sound sinister. "Now...the window is open. Please exit through the far left -your other left, Maddy- onto the grass below. Wait! No, don't go yet." There was that irritating giggle again. "Mia, if I have to warn you one more time... Okay. There are compasses behind this tape recorder; head NORTH to the...well, I'm not telling you where. You'll see a red flag at your destination... Have fun! I mean... Oh, whatever. Shut UP, Mia!"

((Okaaay. Cody has a warped mind...just for the record. They'll start off with the cupboard thingy, the tape recorder gives them their...bizarre instructions, so they should use the compasses (I see how this is educational! Wait...) to cross the grounds, heading North to the stream. At the stream is a little flagpole, assuming it hasn't been ripped down by various roaming delinquents -cough- students, and that has another note pinned to it, that directs them to the school kitchen. Jess' favorite place to be! I'll let you hang in suspense for now...-evil laughter-))

[Maddox Greydon]

Maddy grinned and had to suppress a giggle when she swore at him. "People are always swearing at me back home. Were, not are. This is home now. Home got taken away by the police. No, wait, that doesn't make sense. Never mind. I'm sorry, I'm all high right now so everything's going veryvery fast for me," his voice speeded up on the double 'very', merging it into some strange blend of the word that Jess probably - no, definitely - wouldn't understand, but frankly, Maddy couldn't bring himself to care. He realised then that he'd probably been letting his ADHD get away from him, and once again, he utterly, completely failed to care. He let the green note out of his grasp easily, already distracted by the tape recorder which Jess pointed out a second after he saw it.

Turning around to face the window, having been heading determinedly to his right into the wall as Cody had predicted, he opened it carefully and dived through head-first, landing face-down on the grass, rolling out of Jess' way and bouncing up, unsure what to do now. It would be nice to run around, but he'd rather find this flag... hey, it looked like something had sunk in, after all. Except that he'd forgotten the compasses. Turning to the window, he spoke through it, trying to slow his voice down for Jess' benefit. "Can you pass a compass through here with me? Oh, and do you want a hand getting out of the window?" Good manners cost nothing, right? He'd heard that somewhere, he was sure of it. Stepping to the side of the window slightly, he held out a hand for Jess to take as she came through, hoping that she wouldn't cut it off or anything nasty like that.

[Jessica Air]

Jessica sighed. It looked like she was trapped in a room with Maddy the Maniac, then. She was beginning to smile, slightly, the sheer ridiculousness of the task getting to her. A scavenger hunt, with reading, for two kids who couldn't read. What fun! The only thing that confused her was how pointless she was to the task. After all, what had she done, aside from seen an arrow that pointed down? Maddy probably would have seen it, if he hadn't been...such an idiot, really.

"I'm sure you did get sworn at a lot," she drawled. It didn't surprise her that he'd managed to piss at least one person off during his time at 'home', wherever that might have been. "You're high?" Raising an eyebrow, she slowly shook her head. "Let me guess. Cody gave you the stuff?" If drugs didn't have calories, Jess would have stolen some from Maddy. What was he on, Ecstasy? Some stimulant, for sure... Probably something as easily accessible as coffee, or (ew) chocolate.

She snorted as Maddy threw himself out of the window, shaking her head before going to exit more demurely. Oh, he'd forgotten the compasses; how surprising. Jess grabbed one -she wouldn't need it, with the not being able to read the N E S W and everything in between- and chucked it at the boy, noticing that there was no sharp point like on normal compasses. Surprise, surprise. She took the offered hand and lowered herself carefully, giggling as she reached the floor. "This is mental..." When she 'landed', she checked her jeans, thinking it was likely that Cody would have covered the window frame with acid, paint or something else that would have ruined her clothes. There was some slightly unappealing dust, but Jess brushed that off, before smiling at Maddy. "You lead the way, then. It's, um..." Crap, what had Cody said? "North. Um, I think that's the top one..." 'Oh, this is gonna be fun.'

[Maddox Greydon]

Maddy smiled at her as she took his hand, deciding in that instant that she wasn't as bad as he had first thought. She was smiling at him now, anyway, and he grinned at her before turning his head down to the compass, shrugging. In reply to her first question, he frowned slightly, confused. "What? Drugs? Oh, great, now I want some. No, I'm not... oh, I get what you mean. Nah, I'm not high like that. Bipolar high. It's all natural," he told her with an exaggerated drawl on the last sentence, wishing she hadn't mentioned... those. Now he really, really wanted some.

Looking back at the compasses, he turned it around a few times before working it out, and nodded as the needle swung around. "That way," he pointed and began to walk off in that direction, managing to trip over his own feet a few times before he got his balance. He reached the stream soon enough, where he stood for a second, frowning around, squinting slightly in the bright sunlight. Then he noticed the flagpole, lying on it's side, the little red flag limp on the grass. He bent down and picked it up, seeing he note almost immediately.

Maddy grabbed it,and stared down at the black lines for a little while, his lips moving silently as he tried to decipher the words that presented such a problem. Ah, there it was... "We have to go to the kitchens," he announced to the world as a whole, straightening up.

-flails- Sorry it's so bad, I'm using a laptop I can't type on, connected to a phone with two bars of signal and that is my internet.

[Jessica Air]

"You...want some drugs?" Jess frowned. Surprisingly, she'd never tried drugs; the good part about going to a school where all the girls had sticks impaled twelve feet into their asses was that drugs and alcohol weren't foisted upon you. The calories in a glass of beer would have ruined her physique. It was interesting being around someone that had actually tried drugs, and she gave Maddy an odd look. "What have you tried?" Annoyed at how naive she sounded, Jess wondered if she should make up some stories about all the wild times she'd had at parties, and then decided she didn't need to. Being a stoner wasn't that cool, anyway.

Bipolar high? Pretending to know what that was, Jess walked a few steps behind Maddy, hoping he knew where he was going. She didn't ask about the bipolar-ness, not wanting to sound more idiotic than she already did, subtly checking out Maddy's behind as she walked. Passable. Not spectacular, but what was the last time she'd seen someone spectacular at a psychiatric hospital?

The mention of the kitchens made her scowl. "We are not going there!" Throwing the whole not acting like a child thing to hell, she defiantly stamped her foot as she spoke, glaring. "You can absorb calories just by being around all that food, you know!" It was probably true. Well, not at all, but the thought of being around that much food scared her. What if the kitchen staff wanted her to eat, or something? Or she did something wrong in the kitchen and they put calorie powder in her food to get revenge. Jess began to feel anxious at the thought, playing with a strand of her hair. Maddy could complete the task if he wanted; she wasn't going near that hellhole.

((-snorts- "she wasn't as bad as he had first thought"... Poor Maddy. He hasn't seen Uber Bitch Jess yet...))