“You’re gonna have to start pulling your weight, Miss Chloe,” Remi said. “Or else I’m gonna contest your final grade.”

All six of us were in Etienne’s ultra-private dorm. Although we’d gathered to test the Intelligence potion, Louis had surprised us with some sketches of bottle designs and paper prototypes of tags and logos. So he was clearly putting lots of work into the visual design, and Remi had become our de facto leader, scheduling us for group meetings when needed, and Sylvain was keeping us from poisoning each other, and–

I pointed at Etienne. “What about him?!”

“His job comes last. The prince is gonna smooth talk Georges Delphine into letting us win, isn’t he?”

“Then I don’t actually need to help, do I? If it’s all a sham anyways.”

“Enough,” Sylvain dead-panned. He had the tone of someone who’d been stuck listening to our banter for months and had decided that ax-murdering us would be too much effort. He opened his alchemy briefcase and took out a duo of plain glass bottles, nowhere near as pretty as the ones Louis had proposed, and set them on Etienne’s desk. Inside them both were a few tablespoons of a bright purple liquid.

There it was–our next potion. In the game, the potion mechanic worked as a series of big, bombastic checkpoints as you progressed through the story, all building towards the dramatic finale. But this was my life, and I didn’t have the luxury of fast-forwarding through classes and meals and carriage rides and conversations and, you know, all that mess with Marie’s history. In consequence, the potions felt so small. They weren’t offset with fun sparkly menus and jaunty event-specific music. They just were.

Huh. Magic felt small! How weird.

“Same logic as with the endurance potion, yeah?” Remi said.

Lou nodded, seeming thoughtful. He passed off a bottle to Sylvain. Of course, that made sense, he was the Remi in the equation, the smartest one in the room.

And then Lou slid a bottle over to me.

Same logic as with the…endurance… Hey!

“Oh my god, you guys think I’m the stupid one?”

Remi snorted. Etienne started, “Stupid is not the right word–” and Antoinette interrupted with, “Well, you don’t know things like we know them. You won’t be relying on memory, so it’ll be easier to test you, don’t you think?”

“You have a point,” I grumbled. They had no idea how deep my knowledge ran…but it was more focused on things like their romantic dialogue and gifts you could give them to increase their relationship points.

While the endurance potion’s abilities made sense in a quasi-real-life scenario–like, I don’t know, doping at the Olympics–this one made me hesitate. It wasn’t as if it could open my brain like a purse and dump in knowledge I never had before. Sylvain, of course, predicted this, and so for the next hour, he put us through tests like booooring timed math problems and history (my worst topic) and reading comp and plant biology–without potions first.

In the meantime, Remi was correcting one of Etienne’s essays for his language class, and Antoinette was helping Louis work through the prototypes according to the Aconitum aesthetics and brand. I may have blown a few math quizzes because I was staring at her, fluffy red braid fallen over her shoulder, confident and decisive as she sketched alongside Louis.

Then it was time for the potions.

This one gave me a weird fizzy feeling between my ears, like someone had dumped a ton of seltzer in my skull. I made a face; it was weird enough that stoic Sylvain did too, wrinkling his nose.

“Anything?” Antoinette asked. “Seeing the machinations of the universe yet?”

I swallowed the rest of the purple liquid. “Erm…Maybe I’m too stupid to tell, but–”

“Oh, you’re not stupid–”

Sylvain interrupted a rare and beautiful compliment from Antoinette by saying, “Let’s wait a few minutes. It won’t be something we’ll be able to tell just by behaving as we usually do; it’s not a physical change. Only after the tests will we be sure.”

So we waited. And the tests came out again, Remi with the stopwatch, Etienne with his marked-up essay, joking weakly that maybe one of our tests should be to rewrite it for him. It occurred to me that Sylvain had to have made these many tests all by himself. What a nerd.

“And…go!”

I sailed through the pages. I had utmost faith in the potion–it sure felt like my brain was moving faster, smoother, not catching so terribly on all the numbers (I hadn’t done time tables since high school; my iPhone calculator was my math tutor as an adult). I zoomed through the reading and grammar and history, untouchable. Hah, this was nothing–

“You…did worse,” Louis said, comparing our finished tests to the answer key. He looked between them over and over and over, baffled.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“That’s not possible,” Sylvain argued. He snatched the papers away and studied them himself, scowling. I leaned closer. Both of our pages were riddled with red circles, not even close to the answers on the key…or the answers we gave before the potion.

Sylvain said, “I was precise with every measurement…I checked it over half a dozen times…there’s no way…”

“I’m not trusting a single thing you say right now,” Remi laughed. “You wrote 72 for half the questions on the math portion.”

I had to laugh too. Antoinette giggled behind her hand. I wasn’t super excited to speak in case the potion eroded my vocab too, but it took Lou and Remi reading out our increasingly ridiculous and nonsensical attempts on the tests to soon have us all giggling like kids.

~*~

I couldn’t sleep that night. My brain was hopped up on the potion and on the weird happenings of the last few days. I pressed my face into my pillow. Tossed. Turned. My thoughts were going a mile a minute, seeking connections that weren’t there. Why did it feel like I had so many fewer choices in the plot when I was living it? Marie, help me out!

I had to write my ‘cousin’ back. I just had to.

Something light and small bounced onto my bed. I sprung up, squinting at the shelf above my headboard–had something fallen? I patted around on my blankets until I grasped a thin, glass onject–I unscrewed the cap and learned from the scant torchlight outside and the smell that it was a perfume roller.

“Lavender,” Antoinette said, sounding half asleep. “Put it on your wrists. It always calms me down.”

“Thank you,” I whispered. She didn’t respond; I only heard the blankets shift. I ran the perfume over the insides of my wrists, avoiding my stress-clammy palms. The metal roller was nice and cool, but the glass was a little warm from Antoinette’s handling of it, and I gave it a squeeze before placing it safely on my nightstand.

I laid back down and folded my hands near my head. My mind was filled with the soft smell of lavender, clearing all the nattering thoughts away.

~*~

The next morning, I shared a history class with Sylvain. I nearly keeled over from shock when he actually kinda smiled at me when I walked in and took my seat a few desks away from him. Antoinette must have been real good at not hinting that she was prying into his history for my sake. Or maybe all that laughing last night warmed him up better than any of Marie’s perfect dialogue options ever could. I gave him a little smile back.

Until the prof announced something that wiped all the mirth from my face.

“Good, full attendance today. You’ll have the whole class period to finish this exam. Absolutely no extensions and no excuses.”

I’d totally missed this. I guess no matter what world I was in, school just wasn’t that important to me.

The prof handed out a pack of test booklets to the lead of each row, and they passed it back. I skimmed the questions. I wasn’t awful at history in real life, but in Love Blooming? Some fic writers knew every detail, hinted or otherwise, about the government and society in which the game was set, but that was not me. Do not come to my blog for elaborate headcanons about Etienne’s great-great-great-grandmother, made using blurry assets of portraits in the backgrounds of his intimate CGs. Do not look to me to remember jack about the history of magic.

Eh, well. Whatever. This wouldn’t be the first test I did for this prof. She’d forced me into completing one when I first arrived, trying to assess my placement. (After seeing my score, she must have wished she could put me back in elementary school.) I couldn’t embarrass myself anymore, I thought…until I tried to put my pencil to paper.

Describe the political leanings of the FJI Coalition and their demands of the monarchy (itemized by date).

I stared. I may as well have been reading Japanese.

The who? My brain spun like a gacha machine. It spat out FLQ, the Front de Lib…liberte…library…something-something of Quebec.

That was bad. That was something from my world, my country, and I was struggling.

I skipped the question.

And the next.

And the next.

I was the local amnesiac, damn it! Why was I forced to do this at all!

I swallowed a groan. I looked over the class–everyone else had their heads ducked, their pencils zooming across the page, none the wiser. Well, almost all of them.

Sylvain was massaging his temple, eyes shut, and when they flicked open, they found mine right away. He was on the first page of his exam. It was blank.

Across the row of desks between us, I cringed.

Sylvain: >:(

Me: T-T

Sylvain: >>>>:::((((

As if this was my fault!

We both turned back to our tests. I struggled my way through a few more questions, flipped the page, and got jumpscared by more freaking questions. I felt like I’d be hard-pressed to even write my own name. My brain was full of pudding.

I could turn in a blank test; the prof would think it was more of my usual half-assed nonsense and I could plead memory loss and invoke Etienne or something. Sylvain could not. Sylvain snoozed through tests as if they were beneath him and got perfect marks without even trying. Also, Sylvain worried about marks while I couldn’t care less as long as they didn’t kick me out.

I tore a square out of the corner of my test. I wrote, Tell her about potions. Say it backfired. Safe urself!!

I crumpled it and tossed it at his desk. It bounced off the corner. Sylvain looked up, squinted at me frantically pointing at the paper on the ground–but it had landed behind the leg of the adjacent desk so Sylvain only gave me another cranky look and turned away.

“Time’s up, you two.”

I blinked back into the room. I swore I was thinking about our predicament for like, thirty seconds, and it took mere moments to write the note. But the room was empty except for someone who’d hung back after finishing the test to work on homework quietly. Oh no.

The prof approached us to pick up our tests–and her heel crunched right on the note I’d thrown. She bent, picked it up, and carefully unfolded it.

“I saw you acting strangely, Miss Chloe, but I was about to excuse your behaviour on behalf of your…circumstances. Don’t you know not to pass notes during class? You aren’t a child.” She flipped the note to me. “Is this some code between you two?”

“What? No, I wasn’t–”

My brain was pudding. The note was completely unintelligible, and it was only the use of letters past D that made it look like it wasn’t me sharing answers to the multiple choice section that I hadn’t even had the faculties to reach.

Sylvain then said, “Potions. It was potions.”

“Excuse me?”

“The other night, we were testing potions to…” He snapped his fingers, searching for the word. “To affect our intelligence, and they haven’t…” Sylvain searched again. “They haven’t worn off.”

“So you were attempting to cheat.”

“No!” I cried.

“No,” he asserted. “Just poor timing.”

I expected we would have been no more convincing if we’d both been smelling strongly of weed.

“I’m sure.” The prof set my failed note on my desk, looking between us, the tiniest bit of humour on her face. “I’m sending you two alchemists to the infirmary, and then we’re discussing just what you were doing with the potions.”