Mizuki had her legs folded, hands placed on top of them, and was trying her best to seem prim, studious, and reasonable. Beside her, the bursar was in his frock, which didn’t help him look any less toad-like. He was wearing a hat, even indoors, but she knew that was to hide his terrible haircut.
The meeting was between the bursar, the headmistress, and Mizuki, and the headmistress was behind her desk, in much more of a position of authority. That was partly because it was in the headmistress’s office, but the vibe was definitely one of the headmistress talking to both of them. According to Ingrid, this was a good sign.
The bursar had a name, Kelvin Price, but this was irrelevant, and Mizuki had never heard anyone call him by either his first or last name. It sure did say something about a person to have everyone identify them by their position rather than their name, but Mizuki wasn’t sure what.
“If this matter has reached my desk, that is a very bad sign,” said headmistress Cornelia Wannops. She was a white-haired woman, ancient but sturdy, eyes bright. She hadn’t been headmistress for long, having taken over just two years ago, but she had started to accrue a reputation as being warm — a side she wasn’t showing for this meeting. Unlike the bursar, she was a wizard through-and-through, and had been a professor before being elevated to the position of headmistress. “Normally, problems with a student would be handled by either a professor, a mentor, or someone else, but it seems as though Miss Yono has allies on her side amongst the staff, or the complaints are simply not actionable. We’re here to get to the truth of the matter, and when we leave, the matter will be resolved, one way or another.”
The bursar reached into an expanding file that he’d brought with him and pulled out some papers that he’d apparently prepared for the occasion.
“I have here a list of twenty-eight offenses,” the bursar declared. “Many of them have what evidence I was able to gather after the fact, including some testimonials.”
Headmaster Wannops sighed. “Are any of these grounds for expulsion or reprimand on their own, or are you attempting to establish a pattern of behavior?”
“Mizuki is on a scholarship,” said the bursar. “At the very least, I believe this extensive collection warrants the removal of that scholarship, something which I have already attempted to do before being blocked, which I should say, is not the division of powers within this school.”
“I blocked it because I had too many people coming to me and telling me what an injustice it was,” said the headmistress. She gave Mizuki a pointed look. “As for the division of duties within the school, that is something that would be best discussed in private.”
“Very well,” said the bursar. His lips were set. “Then we shall start at the beginning, shall we?” He looked down at his paper. “The party then, where Mizuki’s bad behavior began, fireballs thrown wantonly.”
Mizuki stayed silent, with a pleasant but serious look on her face. She spoke only when the headmistress looked at her, rather than interrupting or rising to speak to her own defense as soon as bursar was finished.
“The party wasn’t on school grounds, nor was it sanctioned by the school,” said Mizuki. “I realize now the ways that my actions do reflect on the school, and I spoke at length with Professor Arturo about the incident.”
“She’s made more fireballs since then,” said the bursar. “On school grounds.”
“Those were demonstrations,” said Mizuki. “They were done with Professor Arturo’s direction in order to demystify sorcery. A study of other magics is a vital part of the curriculum, and sorcery, through aether manipulation, is a close cousin.”
“I could check with Arturo, I suppose,” said the headmistress with a sigh.
“If it’s alright with you, I have a signed and notarized statement from Arturo,” said Mizuki. She was wearing a ring on her right hand, and with a twist of her hand, her own expanding file appeared. She had come prepared, and resisted the urge to look at the bursar’s face. Mizuki passed the paper over to the headmistress, who looked at it for a moment and then laid it on her desk.
“Absent other testimonials, I am willing to leave the matter of fireballs to the side,” said the headmistress. “There aren’t rules about what sorcerers do on campus, nor about sorcerer students in general. Miss Yono is only our third, and as it happens, the only one to pass aptitude. If there is a need for more rules, we’ll make them through committee, and of course we won’t retroactively punish someone for breaking a rule that didn’t exist.”
“There are other rules she has broken with regards to the fireballs,” said the bursar. “Reckless use of magic, endangering other students, disrespect for the institution —”
“It’s all set aside, for the time being,” said Headmaster Wannops. Her voice was firm, maybe overly so, but it did seem like that was what was necessary to stop the bursar from speaking. “You’ve mentioned twenty-eight incidents. I hope that these aren’t twenty-eight fireballs, because I would consider that an egregious waste of my time.”
Mizuki had been prepared to demonstrate a ‘fireball’ — she’d been working on tiny, minimal fireballs that were more like loud snaps in the air, pointedly harmless — but one of the things that Ingrid had said was that it was always best to know when you’ve won a point.
“I have heard them characterized as ‘pranks’,” said the bursar. “But I find nothing funny about them. They are juvenile, puerile, and an attack on my station. To start with, the most serious, though not the first: there was a badger placed into my house.”
Mizuki kept her face still.
“A … badger?” asked the headmistress.
“Yes, a badger,” said the bursar with a satisfied nod. “I came home to find it sitting on my kitchen table, eating some of my best cheeses, and when I yelled in shock, it hissed at me, then ran out the door.”
“I see,” said the headmistress. “And you connected this to Miss Yono through … ?”
“It’s a pattern of behavior,” said the bursar. “A badger is not a small animal, mind you, and they’re quite dangerous. I could easily have been injured, not to mention that I had to throw out quite a lot of cheese that it had pulled from the chiller.”
“I am taking this seriously,” said the headmistress. “But —”
“But you wish to know whether I have solid proof,” said the bursar. He pursed his lips. “You think it likely that a badger slipped into my home, unrelated to the ongoing dispute.”
“I don’t think it likely,” said the headmistress. “But in terms of patterns of behavior, I suppose I would need to see the rest of the list to conclude how likely it is.”
“Just for the record, I didn’t put a badger in his house,” said Mizuki. “I want to make clear that I’m denying that.”
“Of course,” snorted the bursar.
“Continue, please,” said the headmistress. “The badger wasn’t the first, you had said.”
The bursar looked at his notes. “One of the first was a replacement of my ink with an ink that disappeared a few hours after application. I had to redo a fairly significant amount of paperwork,” said the bursar. “That cannot possibly be a coincidence, and it came one day after I had told Mizuki that I was going to keep a careful record of her actions.”
“And what prompted you to say that?” asked the headmistress.
“I objected, in strong terms, to these ‘demonstrations’ she’d been putting on, especially as she’d been warned about her action in the past,” said the bursar.
“I see,” said Headmaster Wannops. She raised an eyebrow in Mizuki’s direction.
“I didn’t replace the bursar’s ink,” said Mizuki.
The bursar scoffed. “You were seen leaving my office.” He took out a paper from within his folder and placed it on the desk, and Mizuki waited while the headmistress read it. She’d felt a compulsion to snatch it up, but that wasn’t the part she was meant to be playing.
“Mmm,” said the headmistress. She looked up at Mizuki. “It does seem damning.”
“I didn’t actually check, but the bursar keeps his office locked, doesn’t he?” asked Mizuki. “How’s he proposing that I got in?”
“Most non-magical locks can be picked with relative ease,” said the headmistress.
“I guess, I was just wondering how the bursar thinks that I got in there,” said Mizuki.
The bursar didn’t dignify that with a response, and from the headmistress’s expression, he didn’t need to.
Mizuki reached into her own folder and leafed through it in order to find the right piece of paper. Once she did, she handed it over, and the headmistress read it carefully. “The bursar spoke with the boy who saw me ‘leaving the office’ and got a signed statement, and eventually, through word of mouth, I learned about it. I spoke with the boy, and he clarified that he hadn’t actually seen me leaving the office, only that he’d seen me moving away from a closed door. I’ll admit to going to the bursar’s office, but he was taking a long lunch that day, so after waiting for a bit, I left.”
The headmistress narrowed her eyes at the sheet of paper. “I am desperately hoping to get through this without the calling of witnesses,” she said. “But this is a prime example of why investigations of any kind should be handled by third parties. Someone who has interest in the material facts being one way or another has no business putting themselves in charge of investigation.”
“If I hadn’t talked to the boy, I wouldn’t have any defense,” said Mizuki.
“This is true,” said Headmaster Wannops. She sighed. “You both understand that this isn’t a trial, right? We’re not here because of that, we’re here to resolve this.”
“Perhaps it should be a trial,” said the bursar.
The headmistress didn’t seem amused by that suggestion. “Faster, please, I do have other work today.”
“Fine, fine,” said the bursar. He looked down at his papers. “There was a phantom sound in my office, which might have been set up at the same time as the ink replacement. It was like a cricket, or something equally annoying, irregular and loud, jarring my thoughts. I learned later that it was a tool of the students to irritate each other, a magical construct.”
“We had them when I was a student,” said the headmistress. “They come and go as fads. They take a surprisingly small amount of power and a surprisingly large amount of know-how. But Miss Yono wouldn’t have been capable of making such a thing, as she became proofed quite recently.”
“Confederates,” said the bursar with a nod. “Mizuki has more than a few of them. She’s a dungeoneer on the side, in a party, with enough resources to pay for people, if need be. I suspect that’s how she got a bard to follow me around, singing about my flatulence.”
The headmistress didn’t snicker at that, but there was a tightening of certain muscles on her face and a twinkle in her eye. “Yes, I had heard about that one.”
“You think that I would spend money on pranking you?” asked Mizuki. “What’s in it for me?”
“Juvenile entertainment and a vindictive streak,” said the bursar with a huff. “I cannot look inside your mind, but so many of these ‘pranks’ seem as though they’re motivated by nothing more than malice aforethought.” He lifted up the papers. “Sending notes as from a secret admirer, sending a boobytrapped gift as though from a close colleague, a fake bug in my coat pocket, lengthening the legs of all my chairs, sticking my hat to my head — need I go on?”
“No, I don’t think it’s necessary,” said the headmistress. “Though … a boobytrapped gift? Boobytrapped in what sense?”
“I received a nicely wrapped and packaged gift from a colleague, the bursar of Alderton,” said the bursar. “We have met on several occasions, and the mug he gifted me was quite handsome. I was happy to have it, but when I drank from it, it turned out to be an entad. I was afflicted for an entire day, beyond the help of clerics.”
“Afflicted in what way?” asked the headmistress.
“I was breathing out bubbles,” said the bursar. Headmaster Wannops still didn’t smile, but it was the same sort of deliberate non-smile as before, and this time the bursar noticed. “It was not funny. As part of my job, I take a great number of meetings, as you well know. I speak with students about scholarships, with professors about salary, with the people who supply our school with food, bedding, repairs — and I cannot do those things if every time I speak, bubbles are coming out of my mouth.”
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“No, of course,” said the headmistress. “It’s no laughing matter. It’s a disruption of your life and business, something that cannot go unpunished. You haven’t mentioned the three days that you were blue, I notice.”
“I hardly thought that it was worth bringing up,” said the bursar. “Since everyone on campus knows about it.”
“We do, unfortunately, come to the matter of proof,” said the headmistress. “These pranks have gotten out of hand and stopped being harmless, but the question, for me, is whether Miss Yono is solely — or even partly — responsible. It seems to me that once the student body know that something is going on, they run with it, and while my own personal investigations have led me to believe that Miss Yono is responsible for at least two of the incidents, she has alibis for many of them.” The phrase ‘personal investigations’ gave Mizuki pause. The headmistress had only been pretending to be hearing about all of this for the first time. “Given that she lives so far from school, she has had much less of an opportunity than the average student. The question, then, is whether she’s the spark that lit the fire or the mastermind behind a large-scale pranking operation.”
“I think my answer to that question is clear,” said the bursar.
“I think it’s also clear that this is personal for you,” said the headmistress. “I think I’ve come to my decision, but I need a moment to speak with Miss Yono privately. I should warn you ahead of time that expulsion is off the table, and if you attempt to revoke her scholarship, I will intercede unless she’s shown to have done something egregious. However, the prank war has come to an end today, one way or another.” She was staring the bursar down. “You are dismissed, though we’ll have a private meeting tomorrow.”
The bursar pursed his lips. “I should leave now, before indelicate words leave my lips.” He hefted himself up from his chair and gave Mizuki only one furious glance before leaving. He didn’t quite slam the door, but it wasn’t quiet.
“Now then,” said Headmaster Wannops. She leaned forward. “I need you to stop this. You’re a promising, well-liked student who Arturo is very invested in keeping on. From what I’ve been able to tell, most of these pranks weren’t you, specifically, and you’re not a mastermind in any sense of the word, but you did come up with a number of these while at a tavern favorited by the students, and spoke loudly about ‘funny ideas’, at least one of which you actually executed.”
“I’m not expelled,” said Mizuki slowly. She let out a breath. “And I’m not losing the scholarship.”
“A condition of your scholarship will be work done for the school, and restitution for the bursar’s incurred damages, not limited to compensation for time lost, cheeses eaten by badgers, and the new locks he’s had installed in his office and home,” said the headmistress. “Money is very important to the man, and he needs to come away feeling as though some effort has been made to mend the damage done.”
“But I mean … I wasn’t responsible for all of it,” said Mizuki.
“In a sense, you were,” said the headmistress. She sighed and leaned back. “What you were and weren’t behind is immaterial, and I don’t care to hear more about this list of twenty-eight supposed pranks. What I care about is that it ends, and that the reputation of this school isn’t damaged. A series of harmless pranks against a man known for his ego? That’s character, an amusing story to tell prospective students. A grudge, animosity? That’s much less acceptable. From what I know, restitution won’t be much of a problem for you, and even the removal of your scholarship wouldn’t effectively stop you from being a student here.”
“No, the money’s not the issue,” said Mizuki. She frowned. “He was being a jerk, trying to rile up people against sorcerers. Most people have forgotten that we’re natural enemies, that there’s history there, but if you bring it back up, try to score points off it … there’s not going to be any blowback for that. It’s just going to be this stink in the air.”
“The man’s ego has been wounded,” said Headmaster Wannops. “And I’ll be speaking with him personally about what he’s done to provoke such a response. But if this became a common occurrence, belligerence against professors and staff, the school would cease to function.”
Mizuki let out a breath. “Alright. I’ll pay the money, and then … do the work, I guess.”
“Good,” said the headmistress. “Now then, I do need to know which of these pranks you were responsible for.”
Mizuki froze. “Why?”
“I need to see how far this has spread through the school,” said the headmistress. “I need to have some sense of what lengths other students have gone to. I think you’re amenable to stopping these pranks, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is, and if it’s gone too far, I need to determine what the response needs to look like.”
Mizuki swallowed. “Alright,” she said. “So … the noisemaker. That was me.”
The headmistress nodded. “And?”
“And the disappearing ink, which was at the same time,” said Mizuki. “But I wasn’t lying, exactly, because I didn’t swap out his ink, I just added something to it, from a fish.”
“The specular angler,” said the headmistress.
“Right,” said Mizuki. The headmistress knew far more than she’d let on. Mizuki decided that it wasn’t the time to lie. “And the entad mug that made him blow bubbles, that was also me. And the badger wasn’t me, and in a technical sense, the badger just went into his house through the chimney on his own, but …”
“You have a druid in your party,” said the headmistress. “This is one of the things that I’ve spent some of my valuable time learning.”
“Right,” said Mizuki. “The bard too.” Verity had been in a disguise, as a man, with a fairly ridiculous mustache stuck on using spirit gum. She hadn’t been with the bursar all day, only long enough for him to shout at her and a few rude songs directed at him, and then she’d used the lute to teleport away. “But that’s it, except there were a few that, yes, I mentioned while at a tavern.”
“Taverns are a terrible place to discuss things,” said the headmistress. There was a twinkle in her eye. “Just for future reference.”
“Noted,” said Mizuki. “But those were really the only ones. I didn’t dye his skin, glue his hat, give him that stupid haircut — you know, I think he misplaced his keys and blamed it on me. Whoever replaced the sign on his door with ‘Brursar’ … I don’t know. There were a lot. Twenty-eight, I guess. Some of those might have been friends.” Some of them definitely were friends, who had talked to Mizuki about it either before or after the fact, but Mizuki was no snitch.
“Your boyfriend is a chrononaut,” said the headmistress. “Has he been a part of this?”
“No,” said Mizuki. Her voice was firm. “I wouldn’t say that I kept it from him, exactly, but I think he’d have found it, uh … kind of juvenile, puerile, and so on?” She folded her hands in her lap. She was still planning not to talk about any of this with Alfric. He’d think that it was stupid, but hopefully he’d understand that it was funny. It was also a waste of money, if she had to pay for the bursar’s inconvenience, but she had more money then she knew what to do with. How much could a few days of a bursar’s salary and some cheeses cost?
“And it is that,” said the headmistress. “I think, in the end, there’s not much harm done … so long as this is the end of it.”
“It will be,” said Mizuki.
“And if any of your friends, allies, or associates continue it, that’s a problem for you personally, do you understand?” said the headmistress. “So put the word out, as soon as possible, and if there are any pranks laying in wait, you’d best get them undone.”
“Er,” said Mizuki. “Right.”
“Then I consider my duty here discharged, and your punishment acceptable,” said the headmistress. “Please let your presence not grace my office again.”
Mizuki got up from her chair, gave a little curtsey, then got out of there as quickly as she could.
Unfortunately, the whole day was still ahead of her, since the meeting had been scheduled early rather than late. This gave plenty of opportunity for Mizuki to speak with her friends and allies, those who had been inducted into the Committee to Prank the Bursar. The prank war had more or less run its course anyway, but there was still a chance that someone was going to come in at the end it with a haymaker.
Naturally, Mizuki had been preparing the haymaker, which had started with a series of fake letters inviting the bursar to speak at a public function. The end point was still a week away, but she resolved to scrap it, especially because it would mean that she wouldn’t have to rent out a theater. There was also a chance that the bursar was on to them, though the man had an ego the size of the sky, which was the easiest way to get at him and offered a little butter on top of the prank, that extra little element of comeuppance.
She desperately wanted to speak with the party, but they were in the middle of a dungeon, and a quick test got no response. Alfric had said that a long time in the dungeon was a good sign, and that if they got the right entads Verity was planning for, it was entirely possible that they would stay for more than a day. Mizuki had been locked out like that once before, when they’d done the theater dungeon, but she hoped that it wouldn’t be quite so long. She’d taken her share of profit then and felt guilty about it for quite a while afterward, and hoped that it wouldn’t be quite the same thing.
Mizuki was ‘proofed’ now, or ‘blooded’ as some people put it, an actual wizard rather than just a hopeful, which meant that there was suddenly a lot less rock-petting and theory, and a whole lot more practical wizardry. At this stage, Mizuki was mostly working on the ‘bare fundamentals’, but there were a lot of fundamentals, and more seemed to be introduced every day. It was all about harnessing energy and making things out of it, which would then use whatever energy was leftover. Mizuki could already make a handheld beam weapon that was much less effective than a butter knife, but it was something. She was enjoying being a wizard, enormously so now that she actually was one.
It helped that she was apparently making ‘fast progress’ with it. She wasn’t a prodigy, necessarily, but a lot of what she was doing seemed to come easily to her. Pranks aside, she was sinking enormous amounts of time into wizardry, as she was hoping to get to the ‘good stuff’ sooner rather than later. When she was done at the school, she would often spend time working on wizardry in the living room, her mana stones beside her. She was really hoping that there were some good storage solutions in the dungeon the party was doing, because she was already getting tired of lugging the stones around. The better you got, the less necessary that became, but there wasn’t really any escaping the touching of the stones, not even if you were an archwizard with several tons of stones to your name.
Mizuki very nearly begged off the research project, since she wanted to get home, but she needed to tell Rosalind and Arturo how the meeting had gone. Rosalind approved of the prank war — she had an impish side — but Arturo wasn’t very sympathetic, even after Mizuki’s repeated protestations about her level of involvement. In his view, she was poking a powerful man, and while she somewhat agreed with that, she thought that a boastful oaf needed to be poked every now and then.
“Great news,” said Rosalind. “And … probably for the best.”
“Yeah,” sighed Mizuki. “I’ll always think about the prank that never was.”
When Professor Arturo came in, he had a smile on his face. “The toad has been slain, I’ve heard.”
“Slain enough,” said Mizuki. “I mean, he still has his job, so …”
“He’s an injured dog,” said Arturo. “It’ll take him years to lick his wounds.” He let out a little laugh.
“High spirits?” asked Mizuki.
“Very high spirits,” nodded Arturo. “It’s been causing me a small amount of stress, and I’m glad it all worked out in the end. Though in the future, I would hope that you’d understand that anything that imperils your academic future imperils my research.”
“Got it, boss,” said Mizuki. “Now, if you have time before we get into more combination testing, Garth and I have something I think kind of works.”
Garth brought out the staff, and Mizuki focused on it, looking at the now-familiar parts of the assembly, invisible to normal eyes. Arturo had put on glasses, and his two assistants had followed suit. The device that Garth had created was pretty simple really, with the only complicated part something he called the ‘catcher’, which came out the end of the staff, like the opposite of a parasol.
Mizuki channeled the ambient mana in the room, as slowly and steadily as she could, like drawing in a breath, and then, for the hard part, converted it into a form that the catcher could catch and released it without any kind of explosion. This was something that Garth had been excited about, something he called ‘channeling’.
“So,” said Garth, clearing his throat. “One of the primary things that Mizuki has been working on, both on her own time and with us, has been using the cast-offs and imbalances from wizards. This is proof of concept for going the other way.”
“You’ve cracked it?” asked Arturo. His bushy eyebrows had moved halfway up his forehead. “You can have a sorcerer power up a wizard’s implements?”
“Proof of concept only,” said Garth. He looked at Mizuki. “Finished?”
“Yes,” said Mizuki. “That’s the entire room, more or less.”
Garth held up the staff. “That’s a trifle, really. We haven’t worked out conversion factors yet, but … I’d say this is five percent captured? Ten maybe?”
Arturo clasped Garth on the shoulder. “Transforming ambient magic into useable mana is huge.”
“The ambient magic was already useable,” said Mizuki. “I mean, he’s right, that’s a pitiful amount. It’s a first step, that’s all. We already thought we could do this, right?”
“We thought it,” said Arturo. “But there’s often a wide gulf between thinking and doing.”
Mizuki wasn’t so sure she agreed with that, but she accepted it. Arturo seemed very impressed by the result, and Mizuki could see how it was the path to something really, really useful, at least for her, if not for all wizardkind. If she could translate ambient magic into a storable form for wizards, then she could preload power for a dungeon. Of course, dungeons were going to change, and maybe that power wouldn’t mean much if all the critters were friendly … but she would be happy enough with being able to punch above her weight.
Much of their session was spent with Garth’s device, rather than the other stuff they’d had planned, but Mizuki was fine with that, because it was a change of pace. The fact that she couldn’t charge it twice was a bit of an issue, but they ended up going around the campus, sucking up ambient mana in order to push a pittance of the power into Garth’s collector.
There was some discussion about where the losses were actually going, and they had no clear answers on that. Sorcerers were able to leech off wizards because of inherent inefficiencies in wizardly constructs, with more precisely engineered and manufactured constructs giving off less in the way of workable mana. Mizuki thought that most of it was just ‘equalizing out’, but she couldn’t say for certain.
It was later than she would have liked when she finally finished up at the school, though she still hadn’t gotten word back from the party, which meant that she’d be returning to an empty house.
Enough time had passed that the house was actually quite close to Plenarch. If Mizuki had the helm, she might have flown there, just to spend some time in the air. Instead, she was left to use her transportation staff, though it was only a single jump to get there, and Alfric had set it up so that she wouldn’t have to walk very far.
The house was very empty, even more than she’d thought it would be, with only Tabbins to keep her company — and cats were never the best company, because he greeted her with a meow and then went to nap in a sunbeam. Bib was gone, which wasn’t unusual these days, since he’d grown bored of the trip across the province, and was only seeing it to its natural conclusion.
Mizuki had grabbed some fish from Plenarch before she’d left, but she didn’t want to make a whole meal of fish, not if she didn’t know when the party was coming back. Fish kept poorly, and she didn’t want them to get done with a full day in the dungeon only to have to eat some old fish.
Instead she made a big pasta dish, one with tomato and ground meats. It was a bit of a lazy meal, but she’d been lazy about cooking lately, and even for something like this pasta dish, her mind was elsewhere, not focused on the meal.
The timing turned out to be impeccable, because the party came back to the house almost as soon as the pasta dish was ready to be pulled from the oven. Mizuki was a little bit miffed that they hadn’t said something as soon as they were out of the dungeon, but the house was positioned only a short walk from the dungeon entrance.
“I had a very long day,” said Mizuki as she gave Alfric a kiss on the cheek.
Alfric gave her a weary smile. “I’m eager to hear all about it, but we have a few things that need to be urgently taken care of.”
“I made dinner,” Mizuki said to the others. “It’ll be ready in ten.” It took her a moment to clock the new woman, who had tentatively stepped into the house and was looking around. She had colored hair and didn’t look at all like an adventurer. “Who … is that?”
“Right,” said Alfric, looking at the woman. “About that. This is going to take some time to explain.”