Raj reached for another sip. Rosa pulled back the bottle and yelled, "not on my watch!"

Raj leaned forward for the drink he couldn't sip. He let out a groan, "if you're going to torture me, just kill me instead."

Rosa sneered. "You're my teacher, its your job to supervise me until the job is done."

"But I focus better with a drink." Raj leaned forward to reach for it, Rosa turned around and walked towards the classroom window. It took her some effort to unhinge the locks, but she quickly stretched the bottle outside.

"No you don't. You literally pass out after the second drink, and then give me an mark for effort. I'm here to learn, not be some token student for you to ignore."

Rosa turned the drink over to spill it on the grassland outside. Raj watched in misery as his bottle became empty. "My whisky..."

Rosa let out a deep deep breathe. Setting the bottle aside, she looked over to catch Raj escaping from the door. She rushed over to pull him back by the arm, "you're not leaving me!"

Rosa pulled his hand back, "you're not leaving me!"

Raj looked back and said, "at least swoon me before smothering me!"

Rosa pulled her hand back in disgust, "don't belittle me! You are to stay here until I finish my school work!"

She pointed over to the wooden table at the edge of the classroom. A clay pot sat at its center. It was shaped like a kettle with water inside, and a colorless gem laid dormant inside.

Raj said, "I'm pretty sure students are supposed to do what teachers say, not the other way around."

"You haven't earned enough respect to be treated as such."

"Oof."

"It's your own fault. You keep on treating me like a child, but you're never teaching me like an actual student. Each time you give me an assignment, you get inebriated by cheap whiskey, and use it as an excuse to leave me. And then I'm left here twiddling my thumbs like a nitwitted child!"

"My whisky is not cheap."

She grabbed him by the shirt collar and dragged him back to the table. His hips swayed as she pulled. He was only slightly taller than her, and Rosa had enough strength to drag him easily. It was gestures like this why people often mistook them both as siblings.

Raj was often mistaken as a student. Despite being a young adult, he was often mistaken as a teenage boy. He finished school earlier than most, so being a part of the school staff came off as unusual. It didn't help that he still wore the standard school uniform. He kept on dress pants and a dress shirt. He enjoyed wearing the jacket tuxedo because it made him look taller and more broad shouldered than he naturally was.

Rosa's uniform consisted of a long black dress and white shirted attire. The silhouette drew the attention to her thin framed body, despite overemphasizing her waist. Her raven colored hair was tied back in a bun to keep it from looping over in front of her. Her front hairs were dyed blonde, bleached to the point that it could shine in the sun.

She wore leather boots and long gloves for more practical reasons. But due to her filipina background, she was more often mistaken for cleaning staff than as an enrolled student.

Raj said aloud, "It's not my fault, I'm actually too busy. I have to-"

Before Raj could turn around, she yanked him by the ear, "I torch the school's rum supply if you tell me your too busy for me. I came to this school to study aether. If you're not going to be my mentor, find someone else who will!"

That wasn't how it really worked. Raj was a teacher at the school, but he had no say over who he'd be mentoring. It was plainly obvious Raj wasn't committed to his duties.

Rosa pushed Raj onto a chair as she turned towards the table. She stretched her neck. "Watch," she spoke in a plainer tone.

Rosa pulled out a crystal from her skirt pocket and pointed it to the kettle bowl. Upon tapping the bowl, the water began to boil. A light glow emitted from the gem while heat and electricity surged through the water puddle.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

She whispered to herself, "holy mother, bless this aqua."

The crystal sitting at the center of the pot slowly began to float. It levitated at a gradual pace before it reached the front of Rosa's face. At the side of the kettle Rosa picked up two pairs of golden chopsticks and began plucking at the streams of water.

"I don't doubt your talent," Raj said resting a hand on his cheek. His back leaned forward while his elbow rested on his knee. "The assignments I've been giving you isn't for amateurs. They might be below your level, but they're not designed to be easy."

"Then my mentor, and tell me what I'm missing." She pulled the streams of water away, morphing it into levitating shapes around the crystal. The water moved like clay. She caressed the water lines into shapes until they slowly formed distinguishable polygons and hexagons floating midair while encircling the crystal.

"You need to understand me, sir. I came to this school to learn. If I can't get that from you, then what's the point of me being here?"

By the time she finished pulling the water, asymmetrical shapes surrounded the crystal. They floated in a repeating pattern, swirling at consistent pace with perfect synchrony.

"See?" She said confidently. "The reason I'm not learning is because this is too easy for me. It might take other students days to cipher, but for me, it's only a matter of minutes. How can I expand my skills if you're not around to actually teach me?"

Raj frowned at her. She was right, she was clearly at a level above the other students. Her skills could stay stagnant if he didn't take a more active role into her mentoring. He let out a sigh. Raj pulled out a pair of gold chopsticks from his own pocket, and began poking at the assembled shapes.

"What are you doing?" Rosa asked.

Raj quickly unraveled all of Rosa's work. The polygons popped and disassembled as he used his sticks to break apart what Rosa created. "I'm not impressed. I gave you an assignment, and you made it happen. But why aren't you try doing more than that? Why didn't you build up off of what I gave you?"

Raj assembled new patterns over the crystal. The hexagonal shapes soon began to swirl, and they expanded out of the crystal like massive wings. "I think I know why they assigned you as my student. Neither of us had formal education before coming here, but we both have natural talents for aether ciphering. They thought since you were talented and I was talented, we'd make a good student-teacher pair."

The patterns in the water accelerated in size. They flowed reflectively to one another as new shapes formed from his own gestures. "But clearly, you don't see me as your senior. I know I'm just a year older than you, but years don't determine how skilled someone is. Mutual understanding does."

The shapes expanded further. Instead of polygons forming, twisted ladder shapes extruded from the floating gem. They formed art. Fractal patterns in swirling shapes Rosa had never seen before, reflecting the gem's light while twirling in a fluid dance. Raj said to her, "you're good, but you lack creativity. I know you don't want to be my student, but the only reason I'm not spending more time with you is because you've never shown me that you're worth it."

Rosa's eyes glared. She cusped her own picks in her hands and began stabbing at the shapes of water. Raj stepped back while she broke everything apart.

"I'm not worth it? You're not worth it!" She yelled back. Rosa snipped across the water streams, breaking his shapes apart at a reckless speed.

"Stop!" Raj ordered. Aether was dangerous, remorphing the ciphers in these gems could easily cause the deaths of any nearby user. "If it gets unstable you'll-"

"Blow up the school, burn off your face, melt away my legs or steal the oxygen from the room. If I'm being honest, any of that is better than hearing your smug mouth go off on tangents of things you know nothing about!"

Raj raised his golden picks to fix the floating water patterns. As Raj tried fixing them, Rosa kept breaking it as she continued to destabilize his creation. She went on, "you think I don't want to be your student? Of course I do! You were a prodigy before coming here. I was glad to be your disciple. But now I know that you're nothing more than an alcoholic man child who doesn't know the first thing about taking responsibility!"

Panicked, Raj pushed Rosa away from the table. Rosa raised up her second crystal, and tapped Raj in the hands. The crystal shot out an electrical current across Raj's body, forcing him to take painful steps back.

The floating water streams became spikey. It beated intensely as the energy emitting from the crystal could soon overwhelm it. "Rosa, we need to go, now."

Rosa snickered. Her picks continued poking at the spiked water.

"There's no time!"

Rosa yelled back, "I grew up in an orphanage! It's nothing short of a miracle that I was accepted into this school. I won't let some imbecile squander my chances of becoming a true scholar!"

At that moment, she jabbed at the water streams. She pulled them up and out nearly wrapping them around her body. Her arms swung in circular motions, dancing with the water flows as she pressed it down closer to the crystal.

The streams began to stabilize, and she soon morphed the water into calmer shapes. "All I have is aether ciphering, if you can't teach me, I'd rather die."

And with that, the cipher was complete. The crystal glowed in alternating colors, like a rainbow with a heartbeat patterned glow. She tapped the kettle with her second crystal and let the gem hover gently onto the kettle. With the ciphering completed, she picked up the gem and pointed it at Raj.

With a tap of her second crystal, she used the newly formed gem to draw a painting in the air. The jewel sketched a rainbow in the air as though it was a canvass. With it, she spelled the words 'fuck you' towards him.

"You're a bad teacher, "she pouted.

Raj wasn't even angry, he was only impressed. When she disassembled his original work, he thought it was out of sheer recklessness from a temper tantrum. Now it was clear that she was in complete control of the situation. She knew she could fix the damage she'd done, and even displayed her abilities through it.

Raj stood up and said, "Rosa, I want to show you something. You wanted to know why I wanted to leave? I think you to help me with my alkhemistry project."