Gremlins Consortium 11 - Faust Academy

Faust Academy was a small college and quite respectable, if relatively unknown. It had a rich Lutheran heritage in keeping with the majority of the rest of the population of Minnesota, and its choir and its sacred music program were among the best in the nation. It was not unusual in its class. Its buildings were all built according to the same architectural style, stolid and powerful and majestic. The student body was mostly blond, Nordic, and good-looking. The students and the administration colluded to keep up the public image of a dry campus. The squirrels were impudent to a degree carefully calculated to never quite reach the point where someone would actually act on the urge to punt them.

But Faust was not without its eccentricities, even its dark side. A former student's skull was said to be hidden in one of the walls of the chapel. The new art building, the only building on campus to diverge from the pattern of the others, had been designed by a genius architect whose rumored involvement in the occult had led to much protest among Faust's religious faithful when he was chosen for the commission. The building was beautiful and uncanny, and once completed it caught the bitter winter winds in its strange folds and holes in a way that, on the long cold nights, sounded like the echoing of eerie panpipes played in sometimes surprisingly intentional-seeming patterns.

There were also whispers and rumors of a mysterious brotherhood on the campus, one long established despite the lack of any system of fraternities or sororities. The stories varied - some credited the secret society with the very founding of the college, others held that it had been formed in the fifties in response to the wave of McCarthyism sweeping Cold War America, some said it was but a symbol, an echo of something even darker and deeper - but most people either dismissed the rumors outright or assumed it was simply a student club that had managed to build up a strong mystique.