That night, Nevermore settled into its usual quiet, but the silence never felt empty.
The halls carried distant footsteps and the occasional murmur of voices, and in one of the dorm rooms a small group of new students had gathered, drawn together more by curiosity than comfort.
The room itself was dim, the main lights left off, with only a single lamp in the middle casting a low, flickering glow that deepened the shadows around them.
Ajax leaned in, watching them for a moment before speaking, clearly aware that he had their attention.
"There's a story," he began, his tone steady but deliberate, "about a boy with a metal heart."
The room grew still as he continued.
"He wasn't strong when he was born. His heart was weak, fragile enough that most people assumed he wouldn't survive long. But he wasn't ordinary either. He was a genius, and instead of waiting for his body to fail, he built something to replace it."
Ajax paused just long enough for the idea to settle.
"He designed his own heart," he said. "A clockwork mechanism, precise and controlled, something that didn't rely on weakness or chance. It kept him alive when nothing else could."
For a moment, it almost sounded admirable.
Then his tone shifted.
"But it changed him," Ajax continued. "He didn't just survive. He became colder, more focused, and far more ambitious than anyone expected. Whatever was human in him didn't stay the same after that."
A few students exchanged uneasy glances, but no one interrupted.
"He eventually came to Nevermore," Ajax said, his voice lowering slightly. "And once he did, he didn't stop creating. His inventions became more advanced, but also more dangerous. Each one pushed further than the last."
The atmosphere in the room tightened.
"With time, he became one of the greatest minds the school had ever seen," Ajax went on, "but that kind of ambition doesn't stay controlled forever."
He let the silence stretch again before finishing.
"No one agrees on what actually killed him. Some say one of his own creations turned on him. Others think he simply went too far and couldn't stop."
Ajax looked around the room.
"They buried him here," he said. "Under the skull tree. No name, no marker, just a grave no one talks about."
By now, no one was moving.
"They say if you go there late enough," he added, his voice quieter now, "and you stand close to where he was buried, you can still hear it."
One of the students swallowed.
"Hear what?"
Ajax's expression didn't change.
"The clockwork heart," he said. "Still beating."
For a brief moment, the room stayed quiet, the kind of silence that settles after a story ends but doesn't quite release its hold.
Then a sound cut through it.
A low, uneven laughter.
It didn't come from Ajax.
It didn't come from any of the students.
Several of them flinched at once and turned toward the source, their attention landing on Pugsley, who sat near the edge of the room holding a skull in his hands.
The skull was old, plain, and completely ordinary in appearance.
And yet,
It was laughing.
The sound echoed faintly, hollow and dry, with no visible mechanism behind it. There were no moving parts, no cracks shifting, nothing that explained how it could produce that sound.
Pugsley didn't react.
The skull slipped from his hands and dropped to the floor, rolling slightly across the surface while the laughter continued, uninterrupted.
The new students stared at it, their expressions shifting from confusion to unease as they tried to make sense of what they were seeing. It was just a skull. There was nothing about it that should have been capable of movement or sound.
Ajax frowned, stepping a little closer but not too close.
"Okay… how is that thing laughing?" he asked, his voice carrying more disbelief now. "I know Addams are weird, but this is something else. That's literally a human skull."
Before anyone could think further, it moved—not a roll, not a shift, but a sudden, unnatural jump.
The skull suddenly sprang upward and lunged forward, attaching itself to one of the new student's face, clamping tightly onto his nose.
The student froze for a split second before panic took over completely.
"Get this off me!" he shouted, stumbling backward as his hands flew up, trying to pull it away.
The skull only laughed louder.
The sound grew sharper, almost gleeful, as the student flailed and lost his balance, bumping into the bed behind him and nearly falling. The others instinctively stepped back, unsure whether to help or stay out of range.
At that moment, the door opened.
Ethan stepped in, already speaking before fully taking in the scene.
"Pugsley, did you take that laughing skull I left on my bed—"
He stopped mid-sentence.
His gaze moved across the room, taking in the chaos, the panicking student, and the skull still latched onto his face.
Pugsley, standing nearby, looked completely unbothered.
"It is super fun," he said, watching the situation with clear interest.
Ethan exhaled slightly, as if this outcome had been expected.
"Yeah, I know," he said. "You and your sister really enjoy chaos."
"Please get this off—ahhh!" the student shouted again, his voice breaking as he tried to pull the skull away without success.
Ethan stepped forward, his expression calm but his tone shifting just enough to carry authority.
"You should come down," he said. "Otherwise I'll hand you over to Enid, and she'll definitely paint you pink. Then you'll be laughed at for the rest of the semester."
The effect was immediate.
The skull froze for a fraction of a second, then released its grip and dropped away, rolling across the floor toward Ethan as if it understood the threat.
It stopped near him, its empty sockets angled upward in a way that almost looked… cautious.
Ethan looked down at it.
"Then what did I say about not causing a commotion?" he said. "Or do you want to spend a week buried in a cemetery again?"
Without waiting for an answer, he lightly kicked it.
The skull rolled across the floor like a football, hit the wall with a dull sound, and bounced back into Pugsley's hands.
The room slowly settled, though the tension hadn't fully left.
This wasn't just any object.
It was the same skull Ethan had picked up in the cemetery within that prison dimension, and now it had become his familiar—something that listened to him.
***
A/N: It's decided—the next world will be .
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