I spent the rest of that afternoon in the food court. The campus was set up exactly like my old college. The food was changed from a Panda Express, Subway, and Taco Bell to a few more period-appropriate eateries, but the setup was the same. One food stall had fish, another had stews, another ale and juices, and still another had several animals on spits like some Brazilian buffet. It was all overpriced and served on wooden plates to be eaten in wooden chairs that were as uncomfortable as the plastic ones in the old college. I got a lot of use out my repair and clean spells.
Fix It +2
Exp +20 (2,070/788,209)
I didn’t eat their faire. I’d brought my lunch. I shoved a few tables out of my way and pulled out a stove to keep my array of meat pies warm. A line formed as if I was my own booth. It was like I’d pulled up in a food truck. Terra sat on my counter and looked cute enough that no one complained about the wait in line. College has rules, but they are slow to react to those who manage to find creative ways to defy those rules. Technically, in my old college, I’d have needed a health card and a license to sell my food. I’d also have to give the college a cut of my profits. The problem was that those rules existed in an old world format that didn’t exist here so it took them over two hours to decide to shut my stall down. By then, I’d dismantled it myself and had gone to the bookstore to purchase my class supplies.
The bookstore was aisles of stacked textbooks. I bought mine, according to my schedule. Some of the books would be wrong and I’d be forced to return and trade them out for the correct books once I’d gone to class. That didn’t matter because if I didn’t get the ones that were right the professors of those classes would be terribly upset that you didn’t have their books on the first day. I tucked the hand-printed receipt into my inventory with the stack of books. I bought an extra backpack and sweatshirt with the school logo on it. It was a bright red sweatshirt that didn’t belong in this era. It had the logo of a silver pirate with a black hat and eye patch.
“I’m here to settle my account,” I hit the front of the line at the cashier’s office.
“Student number?” they prodded. There was a time when being relegated to a number was abhorrent to us, but that time had long passed.
I slid my student schedule across the counter and let the drudge of a man shuffle through magical file cabinets behind him. In just the time it had taken for me to go from the registrar to the cashier, Fizzbarren’s world machine had updated their filing system to include magically being able to pull up a student’s account like it was, well, on a computer. That was the problem with an engine that had learned what a college was by watching Animal House and digesting seven books about um, a witch’s dermal bumps on a big pig. Because the people who made Animal House have a better sense of humor and worse lawyers than the ones who manage the franchise of the boy wizard.
Perception +1
I’m not going to bore you with the idi-fucking-otic details of obtaining financial aid and paying for my classes. That satire had been done to death. Instead, I’ll just say that it took hours, and I was back in my room taking a nap around dusk, Terra curled up beside me on our Vampire harem bed. I slept through dinner in the quad with my peers in favor of a few meat pies from my inventory so that I could rest up for tonight.
I could feel the ambient mana coalescing into the form that the college would eventually take. Everything was molding to the concept of college that I’d laid down during my day’s work. As I ran those before-the-first-day-of-school errands, the college became what my mind expected combined with what Fizzbarren manipulated and what the engine had gleaned from watching and reading popular fiction of such things. As close as I was to the magical system, it made me a little queasy to have it shifting around me in such flux.
Perception +1
Constitution +3
If I hadn’t done these errands, maybe the college would have been different. I didn’t know because I’d been locked in last time. I just knew that I wanted to have as much input as I could in this process.
It was after midnight but before four when I woke. I knew this because I’d gotten enough sleep, and there wasn’t even a tinge of light coming from the east. The mana had settled for the night. I spent a little extra time at my dressing table. The next day would bring the free day for students and then classes would start after that.
I used my Disguise and Glamour spells to darken my hair to coal black and my face to the deep brown of a sun-drenched Native American. Even my eyes became a dark liquid brown. I used the vampire makeup products to apply the pasty coal under my eyes, deepening my ability to be confused with a shifting shadow. I slipped into black leather that covered every inch of me but my blackened face. Terra became that mottled brown that would melt into the shadows as well.
Glamour +2
Disguise +2
Exp +40 (2,110/788,209)
Together we left through our window, climbing to the roof and out over the tops of the college buildings. The buildings ended before the wall that surrounded the campus. I used Terra to distract the guards long enough to slip through the gates, surprised that it had worked. I then caused a distraction for Terra, more because it was fun than that she needed it. I could have just summoned her. I patted myself on the back for finding an alternative to the sewers. Maybe it was our high luck stat.
Luck +1
Skill Learned: Climbing
Climbing +1
Exp +30 (2,140/788,209)
How had I not learned Climbing before? I asked myself as I stumbled over what used to be a simple leap and shuffle up to the roof of the nearest building. It was weird how I’d just fallen back into old habits from my first time loop. Three years of only being able to practice physical skills had given me amazing reflexes and I felt clumsy without them. I used my Silence spell to muffle my stumbling attempts at darting over the rooftops like Catwoman. I hammered my Climbing, Hide, and Sneak skills for all they were worth, covering my fumbles with Silence spells.
Dexterity +2
Luck +2
Climbing +5
Hide +3
Sneak +5
Silence +2
Exp +150 (2,290/788,209)
The small manor before me was dark in every window. It sat scrunched between other larger manors, and while it was smaller than its neighbors, it made up for it by shoving every bit of opulence it could smush into its footprint. I slid quietly to the ground, having cased the place through the windows and my Mana and Dark Vision spells. There was only one inhabitant, and she was snoring lightly in a bed that couldn’t compete with my Vampire Lord’s bed but wanted to. A patrol passed and I melted across the street like a trickle of black water.
Sneak +2
Exp +20 (2,310/788,209)
The glass windows on the second floor weren’t locked and I had no trouble accessing them since the house was decked out in window boxes full of climbing roses. I nicked myself on a thorn, but otherwise ignored them. What was one health point when I had thousands? At that thought, I took a second to heal me and another to carefully wipe the blood from the thorn.
Floorboards don’t creak when you cast a Silence spell. The best part of that was that if I cast the Silence spell around Angel Hammock’s sleeping form, she just didn’t hear anything else going on in the house. My Silence spell now lasted a good eighty minutes or so and it was going up in duration for every ten levels of the spell. It had been able to travel with me since level 40 of the spell, which was another great bonus. Dom’s spell did a lot to make up for my lack of the more physical skills I’d worked up last time after taking down the Underground of Siff, something that had been his privilege this time.
Silence +1
Exp +10 (2,320/788,209)
“I don’t see why we have to give up our bed just for a practical joke,” Terra told me within our mental link.
“I have three of them,” I smiled my response to her as silently as she slid into the woman’s closet.
“It’s a soft bed that she doesn’t deserve,” Terra complained. “And I wouldn’t want to sleep in it after her anyway.”
“I promise to clean it before I put it in my inventory.” I held my mana over Angel’s sleeping form and practiced my Lift Spirits spell. “Why haven’t I perfected this spell yet?”
I was trying to discover several spells tonight and Angel was the woman I had decided to target first. I was working on sleep. There were several levels of sleep and each one made the body resonate at a different frequency. The difference was extremely subtle, but if our smart watches could figure it out in our old world, I could figure it out here. I didn’t want the light forms of sleep. I wanted to be able to knock someone out. The woman’s mind balked, but I ignored my sympathy. Angel Hammock had earned my disgust and I had little sympathy for her, but I was human and decent at heart so there was that little bit.
Mana Manipulation +2
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Exp +20 (2,340/788,209)
I’d been in my first biology lab when Angel had decided that I’d been unfairly milking my disability accommodations. The disability center had told me to take time off if I was feeling too much pain in a day. I’d showed them the syllabus that stated no absences would be allowed but my counselor, Violet Patts, had assured me that they didn’t apply to me because of my disability. I’d known Violet had been wrong, but I’d tried it anyway.
I’d written an email to the lab teacher, who had been, ironically, taking the day off for a headache. Angel, being the boss, had taken over the class and upon receiving my email, said that it didn’t work that way. If I took a day off of labs, I’d have to make it up or lose the points for the lab quiz. The confrontation, even in email form, had exacerbated my stress levels, but I’d gone to class rather than take the zero on my quiz.
Halfway through the quiz, I’d felt the edges of my vision turn black. I’d tried to hold it back and remain, but the blackness crept closer to the center of my vision. What would they do to me if I passed out in class? I couldn’t take the chance, so with two minutes left on the timed quiz, I’d staggered out of my chair and toward the front lab counter to turn in my quiz. This made the darkness nearly overwhelm me and I’d stumbled into the lab counter, into a trash can, and then the door jam on my way out of the classroom, where I promptly passed out.
I’d lain there unconscious in the hallway until Kat had come out to check on me, maybe five minutes later. Not wanting her to get in trouble, I’d tearfully asked for my water and told her to go back to the classroom. I’d sat in the hallway curled into a ball, trying to listen to the lab where they were creating chromosomes using pipe cleaners and beads like they were in kindergarten, thinking this was the thing they required me to attend?
At the end of the class, I’d sat in the food court and tried to send an email to apologize and explain why I’d left so early. I had been prepared to attend a lab later in the week. What I’d found was a code of conduct violation and an email that stated that I’d slammed my quiz on the table and stormed out of the room in a fit of anger, disrupting the class. It also stated that if I’d ever behaved badly in class again that I’d be administratively removed from the class.
I’d fought it, but no matter how I’d explained, they would not rescind the violation. When they’d learned that I’d passed out in the hallway, they had asserted that their code of conduct clearly stated that my disability could not be used as an excuse for bad behavior. When I’d insisted that passing out was a medical problem and not a behavioral one, they’d shaken their heads and said that it didn’t matter. When I’d produced witness accounts of my passing out and that I hadn’t been a disruption at all, since most students hadn’t even noticed it, they had declared that only the teacher was professional enough to assess whether something was a distraction or not. Student opinions didn’t matter in the slightest. Neither did my doctor’s note stating that I had passed out due to my disability.
I’d filed several Title IX violation complaints, as this had been specifically against federal law. I’d filed with the college, who told me that the Code of Conduct of the university trumped the federal law. I’d filed with the federal Title IX agency, but they’d buried me in paperwork for years with delay after delay until they had finally just stopped answering my emails. I’d sent emails to several lawyers, and I’d campaigned for change. Nothing I’d done had made a difference.
I’d still gotten an A in that class, but I’d been marked by the biology lab department. They’d refused to grade me higher than a C or D on any assignment that allowed teacher discretion to fudge my grade. They’d marked down my papers, scored my tests differently than others and I’d been slapped with yet another code of conduct violation every time I’d dared to protest. Each time, I’d filed another complaint and been ignored at all levels.
I tried to remember how Angel Hammock had been promoted later that year as I spent an hour teasing my mana into the correct form. My bitterness only allowed me to circumvent my integrity by a little bit. Of all the people who had discriminated against me at the college, Angel Hammock had started it and her friends on the campus had almost tanked my GPA enough to make medical school impossible. Almost. Luckily, lab classes were worth only a measly one credit so a C in lab couldn’t compete with the As I got in almost everything else. I redoubled my efforts to subdue her mind, not because she’d been a complete asshole, but because she would continue to be that asshole until someone stopped her, in this world or in my old one.
Mana Manipulation +2
Exp +20 (2,360/788,209)
I thought about how they’d tried to grind my ego to dust, and how they’d done it to others, students younger and more vulnerable to such insidious forms of discrimination. I thought about handicapped parking that was further from classrooms than staff parking. I thought about watching Rianna, who’d had spinal fibrosis, struggle with her two hand crutches to fight back the bush and rocks that intruded on the handicapped parking so that she could get out of her car. I thought about the guy with seizures in our theater class who had been told what I had about his seizures, that if they disrupted class, he’d have been dropped from the class. I thought about the narrow rows of seats in all the labs that made wheelchairs almost impossible to maneuver, and the fact that experiments were set up on high counters that couldn’t be accessed from a seated position. I thought about their arrogance that they were right no matter what, and I pushed the mana to do my bidding so that I could right some wrongs.
Mana Manipulation +2
Spell Learned: Knock Out
Exp +50 (2,410/788,209)
“Got it,” I chuckled out loud, Terra peeking her head out of Angel’s closet to look. “She’s out cold for an hour.”
“Sweeeeeeet,” Terra drawled out in a way that made it sound like a minute-long word, and I wondered if maybe she was spending too much time with Dom.
I slid Angel’s body out of her bed and replaced her four-poster colonial bed with the Vampire Lord’s bed. I then tucked Angel back into bed and headed downstairs to raid the kitchen. I pilfered a week’s worth of food ingredients as Terra stashed a half dozen dead rats into corners and nooks. There was a bowl of fruit on her table that had several of the grape-sized apples I’d almost gotten used to. I replaced them all with orange-looking fruit that actually tasted like watermelon. In the parlor, I swapped two painting positions and did the same in the upstairs hallway.
Skill Learned: Mischief
Exp +20 (2,430/788,209)
We rifled through her jewelry box, but I only took a few inexpensive baubles. I only wanted a few minor things that she wouldn’t miss right away. The point was to change the location of things. I traded her underwear and sock drawers. I found that if I cut some of the socks, I could mend them a size smaller and I did the same with the underwear, and then to her shoes. I took her hairbrush and replaced it with a shabbier one. I dunked her toothbrush in the chamber pot and replaced her small pot of toothpaste with bleached charcoal combined with the hottest version of mushroom peppers I had found.
Mischief +1
Exp +10 (2,440/788,209)
My machinations were subtle. My pilfering was just a skim off the top. Terra did the most blatant of damage by urinating into several pairs of shoes and a corner of the closet. Once we closed the door of that closet, the marinating of her clothes commenced. Was it too subtle? I’d have shrugged off the damage with a few cleans spells, but my clean spell was rare. It wasn’t a hard spell to learn, and the students loved it, but I knew that most of the people who annoyed me would consider such a spell beneath them. I didn’t envy Angel’s maid, not that she had one yet. She would by the next night for sure.
I sat at the edge of the bed, casting sleep one more time. It was a wonderful way to count the time as it put up a timer for me to watch. Once deeply asleep again, Angel became my test subject. I fiddled with my Lift Spirits, trying to reverse it, but no matter how I twisted my mana, it just never felt quite right. I tried slicing some sleep into it, but the spell didn’t click into place. My efforts to disassemble the college would be so much easier if I had a depression spell or even an anxiety one. So far, I had to use words to manipulate their emotions, but with the power to make them feel what others felt under their oppression, maybe I could make some real change to their way of thinking.
Mana Manipulation +2
Exp +20 (2,460/788,209)
“I just can’t make it ethical,” I complained to Terra as my spell fumbled again. “I don’t want to give them anything that will do lasting harm. I just want to wake them up to the horror they live in.”
“I don’t care.” Terra’s tail swished as she batted the pair of slippers at the side of the bed so that they were uncomfortably out of reach. “I don’t like her, and she deserves it.”
“Does anyone deserve panic attacks?” I worried, the callousness of the day wearing on my sense of honor. Was it any worse than the gaslighting I was doing to them?
“You can’t make them nice with a spell either,” Terra poked her head out from under the bed, lifting my spirits more naturally than my spell could. “You can’t make people behave well, no matter how hard you try. People are going to justify what they do so that they’re the hero of their own stories. You tell Kat that when she gets discouraged. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”
“I won’t even use Lift Spirits on myself,” I shook my head at the silly notions of honor. This was war. If Dom was here, he’d tell me that, but he wasn’t. “If I master the emotions with my spells, I’m smack dab in the center of bad-guy-ville. Even now, I feel like I’m just cookies shy of being the mad bomber.”
“They’re going to paint you as the bad guy no matter what you do.” Terra disappeared back under the bed, and I heard some tearing of fabric under there. Once I took the Vampire bed back, I’d need to do some repairs.
“Doesn’t mean I need to live down to their shit,” I grumbled, smudging a pair of reading glasses on her bedside table. I cast my Cure Deformity of her eyes. Why? Because when a person wears glasses, they do so out of habit. They will be more likely to think their glasses are wrong somehow than that their eyesight has been fixed. The hardest part of therapy was convincing the person they didn’t need to feel that pain anymore. I’d written a paper on how people got so used to being in physical or emotional pain that their mind would recreate it whether there was a real cause or not.
Cure Deformity +1
Exp +10 (2,470/788,209)
I tried again to shift Angel’s emotional state, concentrating on the frequencies of the brain signals. I could gaslight the woman into insanity or I could cast a spell to make her insane. Which was worse? The spell would take less time, but the gaslighting was more fun. I just didn’t want to admit that it was fun because I thought it would make me a bad person. That was another reason I needed Dom. He wouldn’t feel this guilt and he’d knock me out of it too.
Mana Manipulation +2
Spell Learned: Sense Emotions
Exp +50 (2,520/788,209)
That was interesting. I wondered if my reticence about messing with someone’s emotions for their harm was bleeding into my ability to do so. Sometimes I wished I could be more like Dom and just shrug on that “evil” label. If I could wear it, I’d have more power than I could imagine. Did the engine know I didn’t want it? At least I didn’t want it that way. My mind was filled with the stories I knew of dictators who ruthlessly took over a failing country and then did the same crap the previous regime did. Saving people by taking over and becoming the new dictator wasn’t a viable option. If I couldn’t be good, what was the point? If I became as bad as them, it was yet another way that they would have won. If I couldn’t make a better system that was fair and honest, what good would it do to destroy this one?
“But you can,” Terra poked her head out again, only this time she was serious instead of playful.
“What?” I took out a knife and ran it down Angel’s arm. The blood dribbled onto the sheets, but I managed to catch enough of it to fill a small vial.
“You can make a better system,” Terra reminded me. “You have. I’ve seen it.”
“Is it better?” I ruminated, healing Angel’s arm. I’d just wanted her blood. I took only another moment to cast preservation on the vial of blood. I gave up on my spell work as the timer for the sleep spell began to wear down. “Or am I viewing an equally corrupt system from the perspective of the person in charge of it?”
“Lily is better,” Terra rubbed against me as we headed for the back door and onto the roof. My mana was pretty low, but that wasn’t why she was doing it.
“Not yet, she isn’t,” I mumbled as we climbed to the roof and into the grey light of false dawn. Lily wouldn’t be better until I defeated Fizzbarren. None of us had even a chance of things being better until that happened.
I appreciated Terra’s support, but I had to keep these things in my mind, if only to make sure that I didn’t fall into that trap. I was glad I hadn’t learned how to manipulate emotions. Lift Spirits was dangerous enough without adding medications for every emotion. What was I going to do, sell happiness by the scroll? I might as well be the beginnings of a drug company.