Rafael snaps awake to a fox screaming in his face, the entire view just teeth and tonsils.

“Turn it off,” Nicholas groans from his bed.

Rafael sighs but he did ask Stavros to wake him up so he can get in some reading before breakfast. It’s the weekend but that just means he has even less time to study because the other two will want to do something dumb.

Rafael slaps a hand down on the fox’s head, giving scratches to the soft fluff between the ears. Hearth stops screaming but he’s only on snooze mode so when Rafael tries to stop petting him, he starts shrieking again.

“I’m up,” Rafael complains, sitting up in his bed, but Hearth has now decided he’s not an alarm clock – he just wants pets.

“C’mere,” Nicholas slurs.

Hearth leaps off the bed, still wailing dramatically, and runs around to jump onto Nicholas’ bed. Nicholas grabs the fox and rolls onto his back, Hearth lying on him with little black paws kicking in the air. Nicholas gives him a belly rub and Hearth sniggers cutely, eyes squinting.

Rafael scrubs a hand through his hair and clutches at some strands between his fingers. “I need another haircut soon,” he muses as he grabs his wand from the side table and summons a book to him.

“I’ll hit you with one from here,” Nicholas huffs, patting around for his own focus. “What are you up for? Mohawk? Bald? I’ll need to look up the spell for a mullet – or just do it by hand.”

“Temping,” Rafael deadpans, shoving his pillow behind him so he can sit up against the headboard.

Hearth stops getting pats when Nicholas is distracted so he hugs the boy’s forearm with his little paws and half hunches up to nibble at Nicholas’ fingers until he starts getting pet again.

Two hours later (and after Stavros almost makes himself sick with a pancake eating contest against Musa for breakfast) Nicholas sticks his head through the doorway of the dorm room. “Did you want that haircut now?”

“Sure,” Rafael says and closes the book around his essay and pen, tossing it onto his bed as he climbs off the mattress. “Where are we doing it?”

“I did Luca’s hair in the common room and now there’s a line forming,” Nicholas laughs, turning away and trotting down the steps in front of Rafael. “Hurry up, we have customers waiting.”

“You’re not making them look weird, are you?”

“We give them ample warning that they’re playing roulette with us.”

There’s a hairdresser that comes every month but he can do three different styles and none of them look good, so you have to get it done on a surface trip -also every month but that wastes a perfecty good surface trip- or fend for yourself.

Rafael gets down to the dorm and people have dragged up chairs or conjured new ones, crowded around Stavros wielding his wand with great precision and bursts of spell light as he styles a year-ten boy’s hair.

A year-eight girl waylays Nicholas to ask if he can do layers on long hair. Mariana is sitting nearby, a smile on her face as she watches Nicholas laugh with the crowd of InCore and work his charms – probably the entire reason why he set up this particular performance in public.

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Rafael doesn’t know what he feels, knowing that Nicholas is doing this for Mariana now and not Rafael. He looks away to distract himself and does a double-take.

Luca, now with the sides of his hair shaved just a bit shorter than the top to look more like Nicholas, is self-consciously running his hands through his hair, trying to get used to the new feeling of it.

“You’re hopeless,” Rafael tells him.

“I know,” Luca says, resigned.

----------------------------------------

The shield shatters and in the split second before she raises another one, Luca hits her with a violent green spell and her body is flung backwards, hits the ground at a bad angle and tumbles – straight through the portal.

Luca sprints in after her, his claw-shredded shoulder bleeding through his shirt but the adrenalin keeps it from affecting his movement. He skids through the invisible portal, and comes to a stuttered halt right at the edge.

The woman fell over the edge, a few smaller pebbles still raining down the short cliff from her scrambling at it on the way down. She’s already staggering back to her feet with a snarl on her face. As expected from someone like her. She’s nowhere near her future self that Luca remembers – hasn’t taken enough of the experimental potions to be stronger, faster than average, but she’s hardy.

She’s already working for the creature reform centre as a guard, and has clearly taken up the offer to be a test subject, promised all the advantages of a creature but with none of the drawbacks.

In Luca’s timeline, the woman fought hard when Luca led the resistance members inside to find the owners of the place to tear it all down. The high mage was already gone, the financial backer had retreated with his personal bodyguards and this woman…enjoyed every second of it.

The woman raises her hand and nothing happens. She checks her wristband focus, tries again to cast. It takes a moment but she finally seems to understand, looking up at Luca in horror -the arrogance finally dropping off her face- and she tries to run, to get out of the dead magic zone.

“You’re not a bad dueller,” Luca says apologetically as a consolation prize, but doesn’t feel much when Christos puts a bullet through the back of her skull.

Christos lowers the gun -an easy way to get around the dead magic zone- a wry smile on his face. "I keep looking at your hair. Did Nicky trick you into that?”

“No, I just-“ Luca self-consciously runs a hand along the side of his head. “Well speaking of tricks, do you recognise this place? Is it bringing back memories of you having to beat the fey in a challenge before they -I don’t know- ate you?"

“Oh, that?” Christos huffs, walking into the zone to grab the body and drag it out for easier disposal. “No, that was easy. We also had a great time researching how to open an artificial portal. We opened another one too, kept skipping straight to Japan for an incredible sushi restaurant. The portal had to be closed because it became unstable without a proper anchor but that was a good few months.”

“Can you tell me the full story later?” Luca asks in curiosity, leaning out over the edge.

“Of course,” Christos agrees, looking up at him with a smirk. “I’ll take you to the sushi place after the last one comes through.”

Luca smiles happily and steps back through the portal to reset for the next person.

There are three particularly difficult to deal with staff members of the creature reform centre who could easily slip out of the criminal charges being racked up right now. The project is currently spearheaded by some of Vinaya’s connections to creature specialists since Vinaya works heavily in trade routes and already does a lot of work in blocking creature parts being sold unethically.

Luca and Christos talked for a long time, got some input about current events in this timeline thanks to the resistance (future resistance?) fighters Luca met at the duelling tournament on Nicholas’ birthday, and decided it would be easier to just take the three out.

One to go now and it’s been so much quicker to just shove them into the dead magic zone. Luca wishes he could do this for everything but he has to lure the targets into position first; blackmail or bribes or -in the case of the last woman- some theoretical freshly caught creatures being offered at a low price.

But these are petty problems and people to deal with, and he has much stronger opponents who aren’t dumb enough to fall for such an obvious trap. He’s going to need more help to go after the high mages and he’s not sure if he wants to go through the entire song and dance with the resistance again considering how wary they are of him right now.