Chapter 9 WHISPERS BENEATH THE CAFETERIA

Of course - here's your thirty-first entree, called *"Whispers Beneath the Cafeteria." *This chapter has just the right amount of computer screens that whisper eerie tension and slowburn conspiracy in the most unlikely of places - the school cafeteria, where something ancient and hungry waits under the laughter and the lunch lines.

🍽️ Scene: Whispers Below the Cafeteria

\[Setting:]

Several hours later, the cafeteria is quiet. The food counters are shuttered, the benches empty. But after curfew, Saiha and Adrah return, trying to uncover the source of the odd noises Saiha hears each lunchtime - voices that only he hears.

SAIHA:

(whispering, behind the ice cream machine)

"There. Did you hear that?"

ADRAH:

(skeptical)

"Pretty sure that was a rat."

\[A **whisper that crawls through the air - icy, ancient, but impossible to locate.] **

WHISPER:

"Prince of time... vessel of endings... you are overripe..."

ADRAH:

(tensing)

"That's not a rat."

\[Saiha edges a step closer. The floor by the kitchen is faintly **glowing - a trapdoor neither of them has ever seen. He reaches it, and it opens with a breathy puff like a gasp after a thousand years.] **

SAIHA:

(low)

"This is right under where we have our meals every day."

ADRAH:

"I'm definitely not going to touch the mashed potatoes.

*\[They head into the darkness.\] Hidden beneath the cafeteria is a narrow corridor of stone - sigils carved into bone cover the walls. Whispers grow louder.] *

SAIHA:

(tense)

"They've been here... watching. Waiting."

ADRAH:

"Who?"

SAIHA:

"The ones who feed on timelines. Parasites of prophecy."

\[Then there is a flicker on the wall. A living skeleton wrapped in rotting parchment materializes out of the darkness: **The Menu Keeper, an ancient oracle who has masqueraded all these years as a prank hanging in the cafeteria. **

MENU KEEPER:

"Boy, you eat the fruit of fate... subst.

but let it be fate *you surrender to now. *"

ADRAH:

(disgusted)

"Okay that's it. "This is officially the worst date I've ever been on."

SAIHA:

(grimly)

"And