Nicholas is washing his hands in one of the fourth-floor bathrooms and instead of going for the drying pentagram painted on the wall, he flicks his wrist to call out his replacement wand but it’s not up his sleeve. Nicholas pats his pockets with wet hands, leaving prints on the dark grey slacks but he didn't get lazy and pocket his wand either.

There's a pause and Nicholas slowly, with dawning horror, turns to look at the toilet cubicles. No. No, impossible, he would have noticed dropping it. Nicholas checks the floor around him but his eyes traitorously slide back to the toilet. If only he had a wand to track down his wand.

"Raffy?" Nicholas calls and some of the fear might have come through because Stavros shoves open the door immediately, Rafael looking over his shoulder.

"What's wrong?" Stavros asks, already looking around, the three wands stuffed into his hair bun bobbing around with the motion.

A breath whooshes out of Nicholas. "Nothing," he chuckles in relief. "When did you take my wand?"

"You were distracted talking to Phaedra, I literally just took it," Stavros scoffs and tries to back out but bumps into an invisible barrier. "Oh, you son of a-"

"Wash your hands," Rafael sighs. "Come on - no, don't try to break the barrier, it's easier to just wash your hands."

Stavros sighs theatrically and goes to wash his hands because the barrier won't let him out until he does. Or until they set a fire and the emergency override kicks in, which they discovered by accident after also accidentally setting a toilet on fire.

They all wander back out into the hallway, just in time for Flick to walk up to them with a swagger, her short bob haircut now in hues of blue with black roots, and a prefect badge pinned on her chest, so chipped it’s nearly unreadable.

“Stop sucking each other’s dicks and get to class,” Flick deadpans.

“Question,” Stavros begins. “Will the dick-sucking be allowed in class?”

Flick pulls out her wand.

“You want to start shit?” Stavros demands, his wand out too.

Flick clicks her tongue. “No, Stavros, this is an educational tool. Because I’m about to educate you on following school rules.”

“I…” Nicholas trails. “Am made of flesh and that would hurt. No thank you.”

“Keep pointing that wand at me, I’ll shove it up your dick,” Stavros warns Flick. “Your – I mean, yeah, whatever. Your dick.”

“Do you want to try that again?” Rafael offers dryly, raising an eyebrow at Stavros because the other boy has fooled around with too many people for female anatomy to be stumping him.

“Eww, it’s a girl,” Nicholas chimes in cheerfully. “By the way, I like the red hair better, Flick. I appreciated you warning people about the danger.”

Flick smirks smugly before she can stop herself but quickly snaps back. “Get to class, assholes. Every time you act up, I get shit for it.”

Felicity -call me Flick or I’ll hurt you- is the prefect for year-ten InCore students. There’s one for every year except for little year-sevens, and one for each track. The people who get selected are meant to be do-gooder teacher’s pet types but also being a prefect gives extra marks and Flick…isn’t the ‘brightest fish in the shed’ so she needs it.

Flick is actually very good at keeping people in line - while she herself stands over it.

“We don’t have class right now,” Stavros dismisses.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“I am literally in your fucking class, we have summoning right now,” Flick snaps.

“We are going,” Nicholas promises. “But Raffy had to tie his shoe, and then we met Phaedra, and then Ross saw a bee and I had to go to the bathroom-“

Rafael quietly chuckles a bit, looking out of the window.

“What is it?” Stavros asks.

“Someone dropped their wand.”

All four of them chuckle.

Flick shakes herself out of it. “Go!” she roars.

“We’re going,” Rafael assures her, turning and grabbing the nearest friend to drag along, who just so happens to be Stavros with his wand still out.

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That night, Nicholas is watching the lens in bed, bored while Rafael and Stavros are sleeping, the magical glass expanded over his lap as his finger roves over it, skimming through the citadel’s floors. The lens is a paired down spyglass, linked into the wards and not illegal but a great invasion of privacy and no one can know about it or the teachers will take it away.

Nicholas spots a familiar top-down person on the third floor entering a painting. “Baby!” he squeals in excitement and then scrambles out of bed, squeezing the lens back down into palm-sized and then shoving it into a pocket.

He takes a left as soon as he bursts out of the InCore common room and then skids to a stop, bowing to armour that bows back. Nicholas leapfrogs over the cold metal and darts through the hidden tunnel that slopes up, taking two lefts when the intersections pop up, eventually having to crouch and then crawl at the end.

After peeking out through the one-way portrait and seeing no patrolling prefects or professors, he kicks the picture open and falls out. He takes the stairs two at a time and half collapses against the old, warped wooden door that’s slowly chipping away into nothing.

Nicholas turns the handle until it clicks and the edges of the door, where it’s set into the equally in disrepair frame, separate with a popping sound and the dimension door connects. He opens it to a bright sunny day and a field of grass. Nope, no Luca.

Nicholas closes the door, rotates the handle more to the second click, and opens it to a lost room which is just a boring empty classroom that got shunted out of existence during one of the many renovations of the island.

Yanking the door open and then slamming it shut, he goes through six more quick clicks and the handle almost does a full rotation. Only half lead to rooms, lost or otherwise, some others lead to places with dimensional doorways but not always in the human realm, and yes Nicholas and his friends have explored every single one.

Nicholas shoves open the door again and almost shuts it just out of habit but he throws it wide again before it closes and rushes into the massive storage warehouse filled with towering stacks and rolling hills of random artefacts mixed with half-worn furniture, kicking the door shut behind him. "Luca!"

Luca whips around in shock, having just barely swung a leg over one of Nicholas' old broomsticks he brought from Ayad Manor. "Nicholas, I was-"

"Come and play with me!" Nicholas cheers.

Luca darts a glance back towards the wide room. "I need to do…two quick things."

"Can I help?" Nicholas asks, jogging forward and clambering up onto the broom behind Luca.

"You…can destroy a divination orb," Luca allows, kicking off the ground and flying them up. "But you will not touch the orb or leave the area until I'm done with the other thing."

"I make no promises," Nicholas says solemnly.

Luca is already regretting this. "If I lose you in this warehouse, I'll be very sad."

"Awww, okay I'll behave," Nicholas coos, wrapping his arms around Luca for a hug.

Luca drops off Nicholas at a divination orb to wreak some havoc on it while Luca takes off again to find the technomancy battery once made by a young high mage in her schooling years.

After half an hour, Nicholas reports the orb is definitely dead now after he went at it with his wand. At the hour mark, Nicholas topples over a stack of precariously balanced books and barely dodges the landslide after. After two hours, Nicholas gets lost and needs Luca to fly him out. After three hours, Nicholas has fallen asleep on a baby grand piano, glasses askew.

Luca is gripping his wand, broomstick dropped at his feet, panicking because he can't find the battery. He can't find it in the stack it should be, and not anywhere else in this giant room – he can't summon it, he can't hear it.

Did Haochen Xia just not get around to hiding it yet? Luca always assumed the man found the battery and then immediately hid it in the citadel as a last resort. Maybe the war just isn't bad enough yet for the high mage to take such countermeasures. He's definitely found the battery by now. Right?

Luca sighs and picks up the broomstick, heading off to find Nicholas.

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Nicholas wakes up back in his bed in InCore and when he sits up, blinking blearily, he feels something roll towards the dip in the mattress and bump against his hand.

Nicholas' own wand is lying beside his hand. He stares at it for a long moment. Lambros couldn't have gotten in, Stavros and Rafael would have given it to him personally, and if it was a Haochen Xia supporter they would have made it known the high mage got it for Nicholas to get some kind of favour back.

It was Luca.

Luca was in contact with Lambros.

Nicholas picks up his wand and wonders if he loves Luca more than he loves Adam.