Throwing 'Em Down The Grading Curve (Finished)

When you attend a school that serves grades from kindergarten to college seniors, you can expect the library to be a varied place. Anything from Barney to Plato could be found within these towering walls, but at this time of day, when night was beginning to fall and the children were heading back to their dorms, only the college kids would linger. After all, finals were just around the corner.

Siri slunk between piles of fat research texts, khol-lined eyes curiously observing those hammering away at last second thesis papers and bunkering down for their inevitable all-nighters. One was writing some lab report, another practicing calculus problems, and... ah! This kid was in her class - he seemed to be writing their history paper, due tomorrow.

Siri closed the distance between them with silent, calculated steps, moving into his immediate proximity with the kind of prowling focus a big cat might display. And it was with this movement, almost as soon as she came near to the poor boy hacking away at his laptop, that'd he'd so suddenly gone slack and went face-first into keyboard with a loud 'clack'.

That was certainly one way to hedge her grade.

((I hope the illusions are quite alright! I don't wanna feel like I'm god modding. :< ))

Siri was looking smug, indeed - a wry smile tugged across her lips as she'd watched the letter 'f' trail across her classmate's word document from where his nose was smushed into his keys. She was just about to turn tail and find her next unsuspecting victim when a deep voice assaulted her senses, lurched her heart into her throat.

Shit. She'd covered her face with her hands, and spun about on her heels to face the direction of the voice. "Uh, what are you talking about?" Her voice hinted with confusion as genuine as she could muster. Mentally, she'd felt out towards him, but the more she'd tried to sense him, the more her influence divided... and divided... until the confusion in her voice rung true. As she'd dropped her hands, her face was nowhere to be seen - nothing but a veil of blurred colors there, where the brown of her eyes smeared into the pink of her lips. This wasn't the illusion she was going for - she'd only meant to make her nose larger, her eyes blue, and her jaw broad. There was something about tapping into this guy's perceptions that made her feel that she was being pulled to every corner of the island. Like it was ripping her apart. "I think you're holding your book upside down." She strained, the faceless expanse of her head nodding vaguely towards his book. Were he to glance down, he might find that the words were indeed upside down, but they gradually twisted and faded until the pages themselves became blank with the effort.

She exhaled shakily. "Maybe you're just tired, guy."

It was immediately apparent when the man began to push Siri from his mind, as it was a feeling of massive relief. Trying to maintain a hold on this guy's perceptions was like stretching a rubber band to the point of nearly snapping. Still, she held fast, struggling to hold onto his conscious by the skin of her teeth.

The blank pages, as they were revealed to Siri, caused her such surprise that she'd skipped back a few steps. There was something wrong here, as that wasn't the intention of her illusion at all. It was at this point that she'd realized how in over her head she really was. She'd retracted wholly from his mind now, and swiftly pulled her jacket up and over her head, shrouding her features in shadow cast by the lights of the library. "There isn't anything wrong with that book." She stated matter-of-factly, as it was - now that her illusion was gone, everything would revert back to normal. This included her own face, of course, hence the awkward jacket headwrap she was donning.

Siri wasn't quite sure what to make of this man - he seemed older, likely to be some sort of administrator or professor, and he had caught her 'incapacitating' her fellow students. The very last thing she'd want would be to be expelled in her last semester of her last year of college, and kicked off this fantastic island she was living on for free.

No, there was no way she'd be sent back to Jersey City. Without a fight, at least.

"You're being weird. I'm going to go find security. You should just go." And with that, her hands holding that jacket over her face with a white-knuckled grip, the girl whipped around and booked it like a bat out of hell, steel-lined boots rapping against the floorboards with urgency.