Chapter Four Hundred and Three - Artful Debate

The gate to Mitytea academy was guarded by two men, one on either side. They were in white uniforms not too dissimilar to the ones my friends and I were wearing, but with pants and the weapons were a lot more obvious.

They glanced at us for just a moment. Then one of them frowned. “Are you students here?” he asked.

“We’re in the uniform, aren’t we?” Caprica asked.

The guard’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the password?”

I felt my heart sink into my tummy. “There’s a password?” I asked right back. Why hadn’t Valerian told us anything about that? It would have been really, really good to know before arriving.

The other guard laughed. “He’s pulling your leg. Go on in.”

My heart was still thumping away as I thanked the nice guardsmen and slipped past them into the open courtyard at the front of the school. “Let’s keep moving,” Amaryllis said as she took the lead. She immediately turned to one side and started towards a small park set to the side of the school. It was mostly just a grassy hill with a few trees and tables.

“Where, ah, are we going?” Awen asked.

“Somewhere where we can regroup and think without looking too suspicious,” Amaryllis said. The park wasn’t entirely empty, there was a human girl sitting under a tree reading, and a couple more at one of the tables, but it was quiet otherwise.

The entire campus seemed to be on the quieter side of things.

Then again, maybe classes were in session? That would explain where most of the students were.

We took over the free table, squeezing onto the bench around it while Amaryllis thought. “Alright, I think the best case scenario here is that we do this quickly. We find Cottage, give her the letter, then leave. No fuss or muss.”

“Sounds good to me,” Caprica said.

“Likewise,” Calamity agreed. “This skirt is way too short. It’s indecent.”

I hadn’t known Calamity to be prudish about stuff like skirts, but maybe having him wear one changed his mind about it. “Alright, so how do we find her?” I asked. “Valerian said where her dorm room was, do we just snoop around there?”

“So, what are we expecting to go wrong?” Amaryllis asked.

“Um,” Awen started. ”We could be discovered. That thing at the gate almost got us. I thought he knew we weren’t real students.”

“The less time we spend here, the less likely our ruse is to be discovered,” Caprica said with a nod. “The less time we spend interacting with the students as well. We don’t know anything about the school’s culture and... well, we stick out, if only because our group is so diverse.”

“That’s one thing that could go wrong,” Amaryllis said. “We might also discover that Cottage isn’t here.”

“Or that Valerian duped us and she doesn’t actually want anything to do with him,” Calamity said. He shrugged. “The bird seemed alright, but I’m not sure he seemed entirely sane.”

I shook my head. “He could just be in love.”

“That does make you feel a little, um, insane,” Awen agreed.

“Well, whatever. How will we find Cottage? Are we really just going to head to her dorm? Because that feels a little... I don’t know. Weird?”

“She's probably in class right now,” Amaryllis said. “We could just deliver the box and letter to her room. That would be good enough, I think.”

I nodded, then stood up from the table and walked across the hill.

“Wait, Broccoli, where are you going?” Amaryllis asked.

“Just asking for directions,” I called back before stopping close to the girl under the tree.

She paused in her reading and looked up at me, eyes blinking behind her glasses. “Yes?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s okay, you can finish your page, I can wait,” I said with a smile. It wasn’t nice to interrupt someone in the middle of reading

The girl looked down at her book, then back up. I noticed her moving her thumb over to the page to mark her place. “It’s okay. Can I help you? Uh... I don’t recognize you, sorry.”

“That’s okay! It’s my first time here. Anyway, I’m looking for someone called Cottage?”

“The painter girl?” she asked.

“That sounds right,” I said. Valerian had mentioned that she was into art. “Do you know where I could find her?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know her schedule. But maybe check on the art class? I know she had that one. Uh, do you know how to find it?” At my headshake, she shifted a bit, then pointed to one of the buildings not too far off. “In there. Second floor. Listen for the people arguing.”

“Thanks!” I said before bouncing back to my friends. “I have a lead.”

Amaryllis huffed. “That was needlessly risky,” she said.

“I told her it was my first time here. I think that works as a good cover story. It’s even true.”

She rolled her eyes, then stood up, the others doing the same a moment later. “Did you get good directions, at least?”

“I did! She didn’t know exactly where Cottage is, but we might find her in the art classroom. It’s in that building, on the second floor.” I pointed to where the reading girl did. Those were simple enough directions for any of us.

With that, we took off. I tried to strike up a conversation, but I felt like all of my friends were a bit nervous. What if someone showed up and we were caught?

We crossed the path of a teacher-looking person and all of us picked up the pace and moved past them in a bit of a hurry, but they seemed busy with their own thoughts and didn’t pay us any more than a passing glance.

The school buildings were all quite majestic. Old stone, carefully worked over so that the corner pieces had carvings of flowers and several statues looked out from alcoves high up in the building. Each floor seemed bigger than the average, with huge arched windows letting in lots of natural light.

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We slipped in, then took the first staircase up to the second floor, squeezing past a few students who eyed us in passing, but we were in the right uniforms and moving as if we knew where we were going, so no one stopped us.

Once on the second floor corridor, I worried about finding the art classroom, but then my ears twitched and I picked up some noise bouncing from our left. Not quite screaming, but a discussion that was on the louder, more enthusiastic side of things. “Ah, this way, I think,” I said to my friends.

We found the art classroom down that way. A shut door that wasn’t doing a fantastic job of muffling a loud argument on the other side.

“He was a hack!”

“He absolutely was not! You just lack the ability to appreciate the value he brought to the artistic community.”

“His entire style is nothing but flat colours wasted on perfectly good canvas! Didn’t you read his memoires? He even admitted that he painted Remembrance of Pale-ish Blue in under a day to con some noble.”

“That memoir wasn’t even written by him. It’s not a valid source for anything and you’re a fool to believe a word of it.”

“Earlier, you quoted from it yourself!”

I glanced at my friends. “I was expecting something else for an art class,” I said.

“Like... painting and sculpting and art?” Awen asked.

“Clearly, it’s some sort of art-debate class,” Caprica said. “I’ve run into this sort of person before. Don’t let them start criticising you.”

“How are we going to find Cottage?” Awen asked. “We wait?”

I shook my head. “No, that doesn’t sound productive.” So I reached forwards and knocked on the door. The discussion on the other side stopped for a moment, then continued, but I heard someone shuffling closer to the door, and it opened up to reveal another girl wearing the same uniform we were in. “Hi! We were wondering if Cottage was in this class?” I asked.

The girl nodded, then glanced over her shoulder and back. “Did you need her right now? She’s on defence.”

“Oh, uh, not really, we can wait out here,” I said with a little gesture to the corridor.

The girl shook her head. “No, no, come on in.” She stepped back, allowing us into the classroom... though now that I was within, I wasn’t sure if it was a classroom at all. Sure, there were some desks with chairs, but there were also a few sofas along the walls, and it seemed like the few students in the class were spread out across them.

The walls were covered in paintings. Most of them in nice frames, but a few were just raw canvas hanging on the walls, and there was even a sort of moving rack to one side with a dozen more slotted into place.

The front of the room had two podiums facing each other, and a big easel between them where a painting was on full display.

It smelled like paint in there too, which I supposed made sense. Though I couldn’t see any painting supplies anywhere.

“That’s Cottage,” the girl who greeted us said while pointing to the front of the class, specifically the podium to the right.

Cottage, as it turned out, was a small mousefolk girl in a very tiny version of the school’s official uniform. She was a pale brown, with big eyes and floppy mouse ears, and was wearing a scowl that seemed downright dangerous as she sparred verbally with the human girl at the podium opposite hers.

She briefly glanced our way, but then continued to lay into the girl she was debating. I listened for a while, but even with magical translation skills, I couldn’t tell what she was talking about. It had to do with the painting between them. They had clearly taken sides and were debating over its merits, but it felt a bit beyond me.

So I let my attention wander across the room. There was a lot to look at. Fantastic scenery paintings of hills and forests and glades, as well as some places that looked literally fantastical but which might have been real. An upside-down waterfall, a bunch of islands floating above a lake, a huge castle jutting out of a cliffside at a forty-five degree angle.

There were some portraits too. People of all sorts of races and species, dressed in strange and colourful garb. Some I recognized. Harpy and sylph and elves and even a few cervid.

Then I caught sight of one painting and let out a little gasp.

It was a skeletal dog with glowing red eyes and huge, ferocious teeth.

I wandered over to the painting, grabbing Amaryllis’ talon on the way. “Do you recognize him?” I whispered, pointing to the dog.

She stared. “No? Wait... is that... what’s-his-name’s dog?”

“Gunther! And the dog’s Throat Ripper. He was a good puppy.” I would never, of course, forget a dog’s name. Not to mention that Throat Ripper had saved Amaryllis’ life. I owed him a whole heap of scritches.

“That was... ages ago,” Amaryllis said.

Awen and Caprica and Calamity came around, staring at the same painting we were looking at. “That’s one ugly mutt,” Calamity said.

“That’s a good boy,” I corrected. “It’s the pet dog of a necromancer Amaryllis and I met a long, long time ago.”

“Ah, was that before we met?” Awen asked.

“Uh-huh! I was just starting off as an explorer then. It was... hard. Amaryllis didn’t want to be my friend.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” Amaryllis said with a rather snooty huff.

“I’ll tell you all the story later,” I said. “Amaryllis got kidnapped, and we had to get saved by Throat Ripper.”

“That dog’s called what?” Calamity asked.

There was a small cough from behind us, and we all turned, then looked down, to discover Cottage standing behind us, looking somewhat unimpressed. “You mentioned wanting to meet me?” she asked.

***