And This House Was So Peculiar

Shiner, for one, was quite relieved to hear Lady Emergency's cackling. It meant that the many students of The Gory Details- including herself- weren't doomed.
 

Not yet, anyways, she thought, for despite reassurances to the Desks that these were perfectly normal happenings, Shiner had been attending since almost the beginning, and she knew very well that this response was not typical, even by the Mansion's standards.
 

Of course, nobody had ever mentioned SCAW before, at least not so loudly and bluntly. Usually the members pretended it had never existed. Some didn't have to pretend, as they truly didn't know that The Gory Details' foundations had been built on the skeletons of a former guild gone wrong. Even when one of them did mention it, it was in the quietest of whispers, so that nobody would hear. Not even the walls.
 

Especially the walls, the redhead reasoned, as the mansion gave another shudder.
 

Still, talking about SCAW within the walls of The Gory Details was an unspoken taboo among the members. Shiner herself knew very little about it besides the fact that Lady Emergency and a few other survivors had been a part of it, and that after it had failed, they'd built The Gory Details on the ruins.
 

Now that she thought of it, though, it was rather curious that she didn't know more about SCAW...
 

The laughter stopped quite suddenly, and there was a long pause. In the total darkness, Shiner could hear the murmurs of the new Desks, the reassurances of the older members that this wasn't anything beyond their normal state of abnormality.
 

Suddenly, Shiner heard a floorboard creak on one of the staircases that swirled up behind her. She whirled around, but in the dim light, it was nearly impossible to make anything out, although she could have sworn she'd seen someone duck behind the banister and sprint down the hallway...
 

She turned to the Desk on her right, who was shaking like a leaf. “Hey. Did you hear something?”
 

The Desk's eyes widened, and she began to hyperventilate. Before Shiner could reassure the member that she'd been mistaken and everything was fine, the poor thing had collapsed rather unceremoniously into a heap on the floor.

“Oh, dear.” Shiner considered running to her room and getting her smelling-salt candle, but decided that the Desk would wake up eventually on her own.
 

Then, Lady Emergency's voice filled the hall. If Shiner hadn't known the Lady better, she would have sworn that she heard a slight tremble. But Lady Emergency wasn't the type to fear things. Shiner had seen her destroy Nightmares without batting an eye, so she decided that the walls must have still been shaking a bit.
 

“The Sacrificial Cult Of Aspiring Writers, or SCAW, began as a gathering of writers...”

Author's Note

Mine's kind of short. Sigh. Not really my fault, though, since I was grounded... Anyhow. What does the world think?