Everything's kind of updating more slowly than before, because I'm beginning to work on another, much more serious fic. I also recently wrote a oneshot, so I'm kind of across the board here genre-wise...

Anyway, we're still committed to see this one through to the end, so stick with us! Thanks for reading :D

“What do you think it means?” you asked, examining the note at the lunch table.

“’New girl’?” Chanyeol read from the note.

“Yeah,” you said. “I was called that when we moved here.”

“Who called you that? Maybe that will help us figure out who wrote it,” he suggested.

You thought for a moment. “Everybody called me ‘new girl’.” Come to think of it, there was hardly a single person who didn’t address you that way at least once.

Defeated, Chanyeol tossed the note to the middle of the table, where Krystal picked it up.

“Well, it was obviously written by a girl,” she decided.

“What makes you say that?” Chanyeol asked.

“It’s written in lipstick. I don’t know many guys who wear lipstick, do you?” She passed the note on to Amber.

“It must be somebody you know,” she said. “Whoever it is, I think you offended her.”

“Really?” you asked. “How?”

“’Really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, everyone isn’t called, new girl,’” she read. “It just sounds kind of bitter to me.”

Sunny made a small gasping sound from beside you. “But Mary Sue is the nicest person anyone has ever met. How could she offend anybody?”

Amber shrugged in response and gave the note to Key to study. “CL didn’t like her very much,” she pointed out. “Actually, I think she still isn’t very fond of Mary Sue.”

“Look,” he said, pointing at the note while showing Amber.

“What is it?”

“If you read the lines down, it spells ‘Ren’.”

Amber stared a little at the note. “Great,” she said finally with no intonation. “I don’t really see how that helps us though.”

“Are you serious?” Key asked. “It’s literally spelled out for us—“

“Key, we’ve already established, this was written by a girl whom Mary Sue has offended personally, somebody she’s met,” Amber cut off. “Have you even met Ren?” she asked you.

You shook your head in response. You had no idea who Ren was still. What did he even look like?

“It’s just coincidence,” she concluded, handing you back the note finally.

You stared down at the lipsticky handwriting, not any closer to solving this mystery.

Sunny and you were still pondering it on your way to chemistry. “I don’t even know what the note is trying to tell me,” you admitted, utterly confounded by it all.

As you walked through the doorway of the classroom, she optimistically suggested, “Maybe someone else can help us out with it!”

“Help you out with what?”

You jumped a little bit at the deep voice and turned to see Himchan smiling at you, chuckling a little bit at your reaction. You and Sunny exchanged a quick glance before silently agreeing and turning back to him. “Mary Sue got a weird note in the mail,” Sunny explained. “It’s some sort of hidden message, and we’re trying to figure it out.”

Himchan blinked and offered to take a look at it, holding out his hand. You placed the folded letter in his upturned palm and bit your lip anxiously as he read it. The first thing he said was, “It’s written in…lipstick?”

You and Sunny nodded.

Then he turned it around and pointed, saying, “It spells out ‘Ren’ when you look at the beginning letters.”

Your shoulders fell. “We know,” you responded, taking the letter back. “That doesn’t seem relevant at all, though. I haven’t even met this Ren person.”

“He just got out of juvie though,” Himchan said.

That…still seemed really irrelevant to you. “What was he even in juvie for, anyway?” you wondered aloud.

You looked to Sunny and Himchan, who both just shrugged.

“It was pretty covered up,” Sunny said.

“Ren’s part of a gang, and you’d be surprised what they’re capable of,” Himchan added. “Rumor has it they’re so spread out that they know everything that happens in every corner of the school.” He glanced around furtively before lowering his voice. “You never know who’s part of it, either.”

You gulped at the thought of never knowing who among you were part of something so sinister. “Then who can you trust?” you murmured to no one in particular.

The other two shrugged again. “Exactly,” Himchan answered.

You sighed when you got home. The confusion from today was enough to make you want to take a long bath and a longer nap. Maybe you would take a nap in the bath.

Before you could get much further than the entryway, however, your eyes alit on another envelope with your name scrawled across the front of it, sitting on your kitchen table waiting for you. You furrowed your eyebrows as you picked it up and opened it to find another note. This one was pasted together with letters from a magazine. How weird.

“Reading my note for

Everyone to hear was

Not a good idea at all”

Well. That was really ing creepy. You felt your pulse stutter as you looked around, suddenly feeling as if you were being watched. You decided it was probably best not to tell anybody about this one. You also didn’t feel like taking a bath anymore.

You giggled as Chanyeol ate another cucumber sandwich from your outstretched hand. It was his idea to have a picnic in the park, and it was the perfect day as the sun was shining brightly and it was unseasonably warm. It had also gotten your mind off of the strange letters you had received. You weren’t even thinking about the possibility of being watched now. As always, you felt safe around Chanyeol.

“Did you figure out who sent you that letter, by the way?” he asked you.

Your stomach dropped at the reminder. “No,” you answered.

He made a sympathetic face. “Do you have any ideas?”

You knew he was trying to help, but you really didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about it. Even if there seemed to be no one around.

“No, but can we just forget about it?” you said. “I really don’t know who could have sent it, and it all seems really pointless and isolated.”

He smiled. “Okay. It seems like it was some kind of prank or something anyway.”

You laughed nervously. “Probably.”

“Not a very good one though,” he added.

You shook your head. “No, it wasn’t.”

Chanyeol shifted and lay down so his head was in your lap and he was staring up at the sky. Your fingers automatically went to his hair, which was really freaking soft. It calmed you down. Then he heaved a big, contented sigh.

You grinned at him and began to laugh. “What was that?”

He looked at you with big, questioning eyes. “Oh,” he chuckled. “I was just…I really love being out during the day. I haven’t had so much exposure to the sun since I joined the Hunters. It’s nice.”

You stared off in thought for a moment, still absentmindedly his hair. “What are they all up to lately?” you asked him. “Since they’re not Hunters anymore?”

He shrugged. “Most of us still hang out there, since we have nowhere else to go. Suho takes care of us, and Luhan still pays for everything we need. A few got jobs, just so they had something to do.”

“Most of you still live there?” He nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

“Well,” he answered, “Tao and Kris took off. I don’t know if they’re out travelling around together or what, but they left at the same time. They probably couldn’t stand being stuck here dwelling in the same place anymore, so they just left.”

“The whole vampire extinction must have been kind of hard on them,” you sympathized. “Since Tao had been fighting vampires all his life. And the talismans stopped working before Kris even got to discover his power.”

Chanyeol chuckled. “You know who really took it all hard?”

You shook your head as you opened your mouth to accept a finger sandwich from him.

“Kai. The vampire extinction and the loss of his teleportation powers.” He shook his head, grinning. “That kid loved fighting vampires.”

“What did he do?”

Chanyeol’s eyebrows furrowed a little bit. “He was really vocal about how upset he was that he had nothing fun to do anymore. Like, really vocal. He wouldn’t shut up about it for the longest time.”

“And then?”

“And then I think Kyungsoo got sick of watching him being so frustrated with all of that pent up energy, so he ed him into oblivion or something and now I never hear him complain anymore.”

You blinked as your mind tried to absorb the quickly-stated explanation.

“What?!”

PS: that last bit came from the thought process in this message I sent on facebook while I was rereading this entire story:

"just read a line in this fic about Kai loving to fight vampires and now I'm like man this whole vampires are extinct and the talismans don't work anymore must be really hard on him and he's probably really frustrated and he doesn't know what to do with all his energy so he just flails around like a fangirl on tumblr all day until Kyungsoo like decides that he can't go on like this with all this pent up energy anymore and so he s Kai into oblivion just to make him stop and then it's Kai's new hobby"

:P