I woke up lying down in a bed unfamiliar to me that cold spot in my chest still there. As I opened my eyes I saw a worried face looking back at me.

“How are you feeling?” Octavia asked. I slowly sat up. I didn’t feel as mentally exhausted as I did the first time I visited my soul ocean. I settled my back up against the back wall and looked at her. The first thing I noticed was her Emblem, it was now a shiny bronze colour like my own with an A on it.

“I’m feeling alright. How was your exam? I can see you passed.” I said making a gesture at her arm. She looked down and she actually perked up.

“Oh! Actually, this is partially your doing.” She said.

“Mine?” I was confused.

“Yes. The points you earned on completing your S rank exam gave our whole group enough base points to pass on our own. We’re all sitting at at least Bronze rank. Xavier is Silver D.” She said with a wide smile.

“Wow okay. I must be lucky, I guess.” I shrugged.

“No, no. That wasn’t luck. We all saw it. You were smart enough to bait him into overextending and then you took the advantage to strike right at it’s weak point. That was pure strategy. No-one was expecting you to kill him, most of us didn’t even expect you to survive. Not even the QuarterMaster.” She was bouncing around excited in her chair when she was talking.

“So, what kind of exams did the rest of you do?” I wanted to know what everyone else had done while I was out. Without even blinking she began rattling off each person’s exams. Krista and Julia had somehow selected a one star C rank exam that let the two of them team up. It was some kind of hedge maze where Julia had been blinded and Krista was transformed into pixie that had to direct her through verbal instructions. They managed to just narrowly avoid Julia falling into a spike trap when she refused to listen to Krista’s vague directions. Luca had managed to find a 3 star D rank exam that made him compete in a race against a tortoise while he was dressed like some kind of rabbit. It had been exceptionally easy at first until he had to answer riddles to move forward. Octavia said he almost failed, but Cyrus, who had woken up before me, was able to come in and give some limited hints which gave him the right answers. Xavier had gone last and gotten into a minor fight with Cyrus because he wanted to pick an 2 Star A rank bounty exam. He was eventually convinced into a 4 Star B rank collection exam that saw him having to climb to the top of a unstable metal structure to retrieve an bird’s egg. He’d also been able to keep the egg afterwards and it had hatched into small gray owl that was now trying to make a home in his hair.

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“And what kind of exam did you do?” I asked noticing she had skipped over her own exam. She stopping looking excited and started to look down and away.

“I picked a 3 Star C exam. It was a boss exam like yours, but different.” She said.

“Oh. Different how? What did you have to beat?”

“So… Mine wasn’t a kill quest. It was a test of knowledge.” She was squirming in her seat beside my bed.

“Oh, like a quiz?” I asked.

“In a way. I was presented with a set of ingredients on a table and the room was slowly filling with water. There was a timer like yours and I had to figure out how to make a potion to survive drowning before time ran out.”

“Oh hell. So you made some kind of like breathing water potion?”

“Well. That was what I thought, but I noticed it was actually a trap. It looked like the ingredients were there for a water breathing potion, but it wasn’t quite right. So I modified it.”

“You modified it how?” I asked not sure what she was so uncomfortable about. She slowly reached up and pulled down the collar of her uniform to reveal she a set of gills in each side. She had a small water tank wrapped around her neck that I could see bubbling as she breathed. “It not permanent, I hope. I’m actually staying in the bed next to yours while they try and treat me. So don’t worry, you’ll have company while you recover.” She smiled weakly at me and rested her hand on my arm. I placed my hand on hers by instinct and she didn’t pull away. We made eye contact. Neither of us saying a word.

Huh. I could feel that cold spot in my chest warming slightly.

The door of the room slammed open and the most ostentatiously dressed woman walked through the door followed by a smaller woman with a clipboard. Octavia froze. This woman wore a powerful white pantsuit, a white pussy bow blouse and an albino white lizard sitting on her shoulder.

“Great Grams?” She said her eyes wide and fixed on the woman. The woman removed her sunglasses and handed them to the smaller woman who took them and placed them quickly in a small pouch. Her eyes were the same emerald green as Octavia’s. She walked over to us and I could hear the clicking of her high heels on the marble floor echoing in the long hall of beds. She stopped at the end of my bed and stood there with her hands on her hips. She resembled an older, meaner Octavia.

“You’re barely at this school a day and I’m already visiting you in the medical hall, poppit.” She said making a tsk tsk noise. “And who’s this?” She looked at me. I looked awkwardly at Octavia then back to the woman.

“I’m August. And you are?” I asked. Her jaw dropped and she looked like I’d just slapped here in the face.

“Who am I? Who am I?” She looked to Octavia and the smaller lady with her, who’s expression hadn’t changed or faultered at all. “Have you been living in a cave?”

“No. Just in Queens.” I said matter of factly wondering why she was so shocked I didn’t know her. I tried to remember what Cyrus had told me about Octavia being famous.

Who had he said she was?

“Oh! You’re the lizard spit wizard!” I said.

Octavia snorted and covered a laugh. Her Grandmother, who I now remembered as Alexandra Hopp, did not laugh. She puckered her lips up and squinted clearly annoyed. I tried to correct the situation. “I really like your Coffee, Ma’am.”

“Ma’am?” She said her expression turing to a shade of furious. Somehow I had made things worse. “Listen here, child. You can call me one thing and one thing only. That’s Hopp. Headmaster Hopp. Understood?”