Interesting was right. Clarice had basically just confirmed my Skill could kill people. That must have been why it was “active” while the other was “passive”. Sucking the life out of other people was its primary function. I had really dodged a bullet getting through the interview without her figuring that out. “So, am I done now?” I asked.
“You are done,” Clarice confirmed. “I need to stay and collate this data. Just be back here in two hours so I can run through the results with you and get you paid. Did you have a preferred currency? Cross? Jarot?”
“Just whatever is… uh, normal,” I said. Clarice had mentioned compensation for my cooperation in her study before the interview started, but the numbers didn’t mean anything to me. I had no idea if I was being paid a lot or a little. “Can I go see that guy you were telling me about before the interview? The one that has the best shot of curing my cancer?”
“Professor Lightglow? Yes, of course. When Mr. Daze sent word of your condition, I had my secretary draft you a letter of introduction.” Clarice flipped to the back of her notepad and pulled out a sealed envelope with just the word “Lightglow” scrawled across the front. “Here. He’s the head of his department, but if you give this to his secretary, they should get you in to see him.”
“Where will I find this secretary?” I asked.
“All the department heads are in the main tower,” Clarice replied. “Just go up two floors and take the causeway to the interchange. White branch is on floor fifteen.”
“Uh, could you maybe not casually use terms I’ve never heard before?” I asked. “What’s the white branch?”
“It is the branch Lightglow is in charge of. The Healing College. There are signs everywhere, Mr. Koutz. I suggest you read them.”
“Thanks for the advice!” I said in an overly cheery voice. Internally, I had very different things I wanted to say to such a passive aggressive comment, but it didn’t seem wise to antagonize someone I was still slightly dependent on. My mom would be proud. She always preached “killing with kindness” when someone was being rude or aggressive. I made my exit. As I shut the door behind me, I noticed the placard on the wall next to it said the room was actually the office of “Professor Clarice Finkman”. So… not a random meeting room. She just had the personality of a blank sheet of printer paper.
It wasn’t hard to retrace my steps to the stairs. The floor only had a simple circular hallway running through the middle, with doors to different rooms on either side. It was impossible to get lost. Once I left this floor, though? All bets were off. As I began climbing the stairs to the twelfth floor, I looked out the window at a few of the campus towers. Rather than sprawling, like the universities I was used to on Earth, Oxenraith had expanded up: five smaller, colored towers arrayed in a circle, with a larger one of glass and steel in the center. Each of the shorter towers was connected at the top for reasons I couldn’t fathom. It seemed like it’d be easier to use the ground and save all that construction material.
I had to stop and rest on the landing to the eleventh floor. My body was just so damn frail! I knew it wouldn’t help, but I wanted to scream anyway. Why! Why did I have to be born into a body that struggled to do anything physical but never got stronger? But maybe… maybe… No. Not maybe! Maybe I was being an idiot if I believed for a second this Lightglow person was going to do anything for me. I hated that I needed help. Hated that I even with all I’d been through, there was still a little voice in the back of my head telling me this time might be the one! This injection, this surgery, this magical cure. I hated that voice. If it would just shut up, I wouldn’t have to be so disappointed all the time.
Breath heaving, I reached the top floor of the blue tower. I had to stop and lean on the railing for a minute. I wondered briefly how long it was going to take me to recover enough to continue on. A pop-up appeared in my vision.
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Would you like to start tracking Stamina? [Yes] [No] [Cancel]
Sure. Whatever. I clicked “yes”. Down at the bottom of my vision, below the blue MP bar, a green one appeared. It was labeled “SP”.
HP: 92/100
MP: 163/96
SP: 23/100
The new stamina bar flashed red to let me know it was critically low. I watched it while I caught my breath. After a minute, it ticked up to 24/100. I still wasn’t ready to move on. I thought about what I would do if this last hope to cure my cancer failed. Would I let myself die? It was easy to turn down the church’s offer to make me a mind slave when I still had time to find a better solution. What about when my countdown timer only had days left? Would I still turn them down?
When my SP reached 30/100, it stopped flashing red. That was about the same time I felt strong enough to continue on. Good to know. Below thirty stamina and all I could manage was to gasp and clutch at something to stay on my feet. Even a year ago, I would have been able to climb stairs with ease. Back then, I didn’t even know cancer was growing inside me.
From the stairwell at the top floor, I followed the signs for the interchange. When I reached it, I saw it was a simple hallway with massive glass windows instead of walls. I passed a few students with blue streaks in their hair reading books in the sunlight. More signs at the end of that hall indicated which way I would need to turn up ahead to get to whatever branch I was trying to find. I found it odd that one tower was clearly painted red, but there was no sign of “Red Branch”. The four branches the signs directed to were: Black, and White to the left, and Yellow, and Green to the right.
When I reached the main building, the ceiling opened up to a completely unnecessary twenty foot height. Students milled around a moving staircase in the middle of the chamber. I could see the causeways that led to the other four towers spread out at regular intervals. Large blocky letters were mounted to the wall above each entrance. Working around the circle from my left there was a black one labeled “Combat College”, a white one labeled “Healing College”, a yellow one labeled “Law College”, and a red one labeled “Construct College”. Tucked against the walls between those different entrances were tables with groups of students seated around them, talking animatedly to each other. Unlike in the quieter causeway, it seemed to me like there was more socializing than studying going on among those students.
The feature of the room that drew my eye the most was the staircase in the center. That was where most of the activity of the room was located. It was a spiral staircase of solid steel with smooth edges. When I first saw it, I thought maybe it was spinning, but as I watched it, I realized it was actually falling. It was only the coil of the structure that gave the impression of spinning.
I watched students get on and off the stairs like they were boarding some kind of backwoods circus ride with no safety standards. There weren’t even railings! The thing just slowly descended and when students that were on it wanted to get off, they stuck out their foot and grabbed one of the metal handles. Those on the current floor that wanted to get on would just wait for one of the spirals to pass them by, then make a short jump. It looked like a pretty massive expense for something that could only take you to a lower floor. Clarice had told me Lightglow’s office was on the fifteenth floor of the main tower. That meant I should have needed to go up three floors, but that descending staircase was the only one I could see. I made sure I wasn’t standing in anyone’s way, then watched the stairs to see when it would start going back up.
It didn’t. After five minutes of waiting, I was convinced it must have traveled the length of the entire tower several times over, but it kept descending! That was impossible, from what I knew of physics. There had to be some kind of magic at play.