It was eerily silent as I stepped into the place where everyone else had breakfast. What happened to me must have circulated around this hotel, if not around the whole batch of students visiting this town.
So it was no wonder that all of my classmates looked at me intensely.
“I know my hair is unkempt …” I said and directly strolled towards the counter to take a tray. After filling it up with a bit of food, I strolled over to my usual friend group who were quite stunned to see me going around so casually.
“I’m so glad to see you again!” Luna said, barely holding back her tears once I sat down right next to her.
“And so am I.” I said happily and patted her head lovingly. She was really the only reason I didn’t hole up in Hannah’s room the whole day after all.
“What happened? I heard you nearly drowned?” Olivia asked concerned. As usual, she was interested in everything that happened and didn’t care much about the feelings of those involved.
“Eh … I managed to avoid the fate of drowning once more.” I explained and stared munching on my bread with cheese casually.
“Once more?” Ellie asked, picking up on what I said right away.
“Oh … yeah. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I always panic when I’m around water. I nearly drowned as I was seven and that did leave a long lasting impression.” I explained and scratched my head slightly. I had to give them some sort of reasoning for my panic that day and this was the most feasible lie I could come up with.
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Ellie said, quite taken aback all of a sudden.
“It’s fine. It’s fine. My fears aren’t hindering me usually, but swimming or diving is completely out of question.” I revealed a bit embarrassed. I originally didn’t want to tell anyone about this secret of mine, but sweeping it under the rug wasn’t possible anymore.
“That’s why you were always so cautious around water.” Ellie commented, rightfully so. She must have picked up days before the others as I struggled at every opportunity to wash myself.
“How did I miss that?” Louis said, suddenly very depressed by the fact Ellie knew more about me than him.
“I’m good at hiding stuff.” I mentioned on the fly and giggled a bit. The atmosphere at the table turned way happier immediately, which seemed to relive the other students watching us as well.
“I’d like to object. Nobody can fool me!” Olivia said and laughed happily. Most of us joined in, but I did so for a vastly different reason. For someone aspiring to be an investigative reporter, she hadn’t uncovered anything about me so far.
“You haven’t figured out I brush my teeth exactly two minutes and thirty four seconds.” We were back to being normal, which I found hard to believe considering one of their classmates nearly drowned. But I didn’t want it any other way as I hated these pitiful gazes the others showed me from time to time.
Thus, everything was kind of back to normal with only one exception. I wouldn’t go with them that day and another teacher would take Hannah´s spot for once. Nobody complained that I wanted to focus on my health at all, even though it meant they had to go to a museum with a parallel class.
Well, that also meant I could go back into bed after breakfast and used that opportunity to cuddle with my beloved pillow for a bit while thinking about my next steps.
One was painfully obvious. Write a letter.
‘Hey, what´s up? How are you doing? I can´t wait to see you again and tell you about all the fun things I experienced at Atlantis. The beach is totally amazing and even from close up, I couldn’t see any dirt in the water. I´ll tell you more later, but I need you to solve a riddle for me first. Do you remember Claudia? My pet chameleon? It turned out a freshmen at the academy gave it a new home, which is totally amazing. Can you guess who it is?’
It was short to keep costs down, hid every part of the message I needed to convey behind a wall of foolishness and I was sure Tom would understand that I needed him to search for the demon hiding at the academy. My only hope was that the records were enough to find out anything, otherwise it may be an impossible request. But hey, it wasn’t me who would need to put a whole lot of work into it.
A bit glad to have Tom, I thus strolled out of the hotel with Hannah, hoping to find someone at the guild who would relay the message for me. Before we stepped into the burning hot sun though, I hid the letter behind me as I noticed someone who shouldn’t be there.
“Students are not allowed to be on their own.” Hannah said to Schwarz who waited at the gates for us. Scratching his cheek awkwardly, he looked to the ground between his feet and opened his mouth a little, but closed it shortly afterwards.
“I´m sorry, Lucy. I shouldn’t have done what I did, I shouldn’t have acted on impulse and I … I´m so sorry you got hurt because of me.” His apology was genuine, which didn’t fit with his character at all. He was unfriendly, distant and downright rude sometimes, but around me he behaved more like a little kitten sometimes.
“It´s okay … but I really wished you would have listened to me.” I told him, hoping to guilt trip into doing what I wanted from that day onwards.
“No its not okay. I hurt you. You could have died because of me!” As if he could kill me. In fact, I was more prone to dying because of my disregard for my own health than because of his actions.
“I could have. But I didn’t. And I heard you were the most concerned of all. If you promise me to listen to my warning next time, I´ll gladly forget everything that happened.” I said and put my gloved hand on his shoulder and looked him deep into the eyes.
“Thank you … and yes I promise to listen to you from now on.” Breathing out happily, I smiled at him and pulled him towards me to hug him tightly.
“No matter what others say, your heart is at the right place.” I said and let go of him shortly afterwards. Our hug didn’t last long at all, but it was enough for him to be completely overwhelmed by his emotions.
“Now, I´m not the kind of teacher who thinks every rule is necessary, but your homeroom teacher is. Are you sure you want to stick around any longer?” Hannah asked while staring at him strictly.
“No … mam. And thank you.” He said, bowed deeply and ran away right away. I chuckled a bit as he could possibly still hear me, but that died down soon enough. Balling my hands to fists, I imagined punching him until he wouldn’t move anymore.
But I quickly shook my head as doing so would hamper my plans somewhat. At least the reason for my newfound hatred for him had a positive side effect. He would listen to me at least somewhat, because he knew very well he couldn’t risk such a horrible incident a second time.
After our little conversation, Hannah and I were free to go wherever we wanted and directly used that opportunity to get to the merchants guild. Apparently, they didn’t have that large of a branch in this town as they shared the same building with the adventurers guild. Well, this town was a hot tourist location for wealthy nobles which allowed it to have all kinds of buildings like theatres but otherwise it wasn’t that special.
The surroundings were quite calm as well so there weren’t many adventurers around as we stepped into the shared buildings. Hannah directly walked over to them in an attempt to gather intel about the abandoned mine while I strolled over to the sole receptionist.
“Hello. Ehh, I need this letter to be delivered to the capital rather quickly.” I explained and put the letter onto the counter.
“Sure thing. Just fill out this form and the next merchant travelling east will take it with him.” The receptionist explained and reached beneath the wooden plate to retrieve a form and a feather with ink. After filling out the first few blank spaces, I quickly stumbled across a problem though.
“What’s a client code?” I asked the receptionist in a little bit of worry. I always despised bureaucracy because it tended to stay in the way of so many simple things.
“That’s a code which identifies you personally. If you acted in bad faith for example and asked us to deliver anything illegal, we could block you from requesting anything else everywhere.” Or they could keep track of their clients in a simpler way. The only issue was probably to ensure that every branch had their information updated regularly.
“That’s neat. Where do I get one?” I asked quickly. If it was a decentralised system anyway, there shouldn’t be a problem making one right away.
“Right here. It costs twenty gold coins though.” These muggers! Twenty gold coins to get a bit of bureaucracy done? They were basically robbing me in broad daylight! These pitiful adventurers in the other side of the room were paid in silver coins for their quests, so how were they ever going to pay to register in the first place?
Or the merchant’s guild only focused rich customers with their services, which would make sense as well. A poor person would never want to send a letter because frankly speaking, he simply didn’t knew outside the place he lived in. Those travelling were either strong enough, in which case they could pay for this service at one point, or they were filthy rich. The thing was … I didn’t want to spend twenty gold coins to have a letter delivered.
“Hannah?” I asked after turning around. She was with the other adventurers around a table with something dead on it. Maybe it was an invasive specials or something, because there wasn’t much reason for a dead animal to gather that much attention.
“Coming!” She said back and jogged over to us right away. She only needed to look on the form a second until she realised the problem. “Can we do it under my name?”
“Sure thing.” The receptionist presented her with an identical form which she directly filled out. Strangely enough, the receptionist didn’t even flinch as she left the space for her family name blank. “Thank you very much.”
“It’s been a pleasure.” Hannah said and nodded over towards the group of adventurers. “You might want to check that out.”
After nodding in silence, we strolled over to them. At first, I couldn’t even see what they were all looking at as their bodies blocked my view. But as Hannah cleared her throat a little, they directly made place for her and me.
“Mam? What do you think?” The bulkiest one of the bunch asked right away, pointing towards a mouse in a cage. That animal was dead for sure, at least that’s what my godly senses told me. It’s belly was also ripped open quite brutally and it stank horribly of rotten flesh. For all I knew, that thing was dead. And yet it moved.
Frantically, it threw itself against the cage relentlessly, trying to do something against the metal bars which it was obviously unable to.
“It’s … dead?” I mumbled in a little bit of confusion. My magic to resurrect everything around me wasn’t of for too long. That mouse should have been resurrected by me, but it still lacked a soul. If I forced it, I would be able to put the old one back into the mouse, but my spell was meant for easy targets, not dead creatures already under control of someone else.
“It’s undead.” One of the adventurers said as if I was dumb. Glancing over to him, I could see him grin at me which only served to underline his position, but didn’t change the fact that in fact it was him who was dumb.
The creatures I created were undead … but not these things. They were merely a husk of their former selves with no personality to speak of. It was an inferior version of what I could do because my creations had intelligence befitting of their past race while these things were completely dumb.
Snipping against the cage arrogantly, the mouse was put into another frenzy right away as it tried to bite my finger at all costs.
“Who would raise undead creatures … and who could do such a thing?”
“A necromancer.” Necromancy wasn’t exactly forbidden, but it always led to the same results. A husk overwhelmed by their instincts. And most of these instincts were inherently harmful to humans, which meant it was indirectly a criminal act to use necromancy. You could still study it of course, but only if you have a solid reasoning why you want to research the dead.
“That’s a grim future ahead.” Truly, none of these adventurers were happy about the prospect of a fight, but rather worried about themselves. With a necromancer on the loose, everything could happen to those venturing out of the town.
“You should request the help of an S-class adventurer at least. I fear the town won’t be able to hold without if that person has any malicious intent.” Hannah proposed and was quickly met with nodding from all humans around the table.
“Well do that … and if we are attacked before that, we’ll beat that bastard ourselves.” Well, that was certainly a way to make sure to be the first one to die … but alright. I wouldn’t stop him. Well, it wasn’t really our time to butt in, so we left the building after saying goodbye to the group. We didn’t head straight home though, but rather searched the whole town for a useful book.
“That wasn’t one of yours, right?” Hannah asked back in her room while I took my time to read the very few books about necromancy the towns bookshops had … which was exactly one book.
“No. I ordered mine to keep hidden and play dead.” I answered a bit distracted by the book.
“I see … the next S-rank adventurer is in a city three days to the north.” And because of my luck, I seriously doubted he or she would get to this town in time.
“It doesn’t matter how long that adventurer needs. That necromancer is twenty kilometres to the north.” I explained right away. If that person wanted to mess around, he would do so in the next few days.
“How do you know that?” Well, I knew because I could feel it. I couldn’t tell what my creations were experiencing at all. The most I could do was to give them orders fitting for their intelligence, and tell if they are still in existence or not.
“Because all my creations there are gone. That person really has a knack for privacy.” And a way for him to find my creations … which was much more concerning.
It was eerily silent as I stepped into the place where everyone else had breakfast. What happened to me must have circulated around this hotel, if not around the whole batch of students visiting this town.
So it was no wonder that all of my classmates looked at me intensely.
“I know my hair is unkempt …” I said and directly strolled towards the counter to take a tray. After filling it up with a bit of food, I strolled over to my usual friend group who were quite stunned to see me going around so casually.
“I’m so glad to see you again!” Luna said, barely holding back her tears once I sat down right next to her.
“And so am I.” I said happily and patted her head lovingly. She was really the only reason I didn’t hole up in Hannah’s room the whole day after all.
“What happened? I heard you nearly drowned?” Olivia asked concerned. As usual, she was interested in everything that happened and didn’t care much about the feelings of those involved.
“Eh … I managed to avoid the fate of drowning once more.” I explained and stared munching on my bread with cheese casually.
“Once more?” Ellie asked, picking up on what I said right away.
“Oh … yeah. It’s kind of embarrassing, but I always panic when I’m around water. I nearly drowned as I was seven and that did leave a long lasting impression.” I explained and scratched my head slightly. I had to give them some sort of reasoning for my panic that day and this was the most feasible lie I could come up with.
“I’m so sorry to hear that.” Ellie said, quite taken aback all of a sudden.
“It’s fine. It’s fine. My fears aren’t hindering me usually, but swimming or diving is completely out of question.” I revealed a bit embarrassed. I originally didn’t want to tell anyone about this secret of mine, but sweeping it under the rug wasn’t possible anymore.
“That’s why you were always so cautious around water.” Ellie commented, rightfully so. She must have picked up days before the others as I struggled at every opportunity to wash myself.
“How did I miss that?” Louis said, suddenly very depressed by the fact Ellie knew more about me than him.
“I’m good at hiding stuff.” I mentioned on the fly and giggled a bit. The atmosphere at the table turned way happier immediately, which seemed to relive the other students watching us as well.
“I’d like to object. Nobody can fool me!” Olivia said and laughed happily. Most of us joined in, but I did so for a vastly different reason. For someone aspiring to be an investigative reporter, she hadn’t uncovered anything about me so far.
“You haven’t figured out I brush my teeth exactly two minutes and thirty four seconds.” We were back to being normal, which I found hard to believe considering one of their classmates nearly drowned. But I didn’t want it any other way as I hated these pitiful gazes the others showed me from time to time.
Thus, everything was kind of back to normal with only one exception. I wouldn’t go with them that day and another teacher would take Hannah´s spot for once. Nobody complained that I wanted to focus on my health at all, even though it meant they had to go to a museum with a parallel class.
Well, that also meant I could go back into bed after breakfast and used that opportunity to cuddle with my beloved pillow for a bit while thinking about my next steps.
One was painfully obvious. Write a letter.
‘Hey, what´s up? How are you doing? I can´t wait to see you again and tell you about all the fun things I experienced at Atlantis. The beach is totally amazing and even from close up, I couldn’t see any dirt in the water. I´ll tell you more later, but I need you to solve a riddle for me first. Do you remember Claudia? My pet chameleon? It turned out a freshmen at the academy gave it a new home, which is totally amazing. Can you guess who it is?’
It was short to keep costs down, hid every part of the message I needed to convey behind a wall of foolishness and I was sure Tom would understand that I needed him to search for the demon hiding at the academy. My only hope was that the records were enough to find out anything, otherwise it may be an impossible request. But hey, it wasn’t me who would need to put a whole lot of work into it.
A bit glad to have Tom, I thus strolled out of the hotel with Hannah, hoping to find someone at the guild who would relay the message for me. Before we stepped into the burning hot sun though, I hid the letter behind me as I noticed someone who shouldn’t be there.
“Students are not allowed to be on their own.” Hannah said to Schwarz who waited at the gates for us. Scratching his cheek awkwardly, he looked to the ground between his feet and opened his mouth a little, but closed it shortly afterwards.
“I´m sorry, Lucy. I shouldn’t have done what I did, I shouldn’t have acted on impulse and I … I´m so sorry you got hurt because of me.” His apology was genuine, which didn’t fit with his character at all. He was unfriendly, distant and downright rude sometimes, but around me he behaved more like a little kitten sometimes.
“It´s okay … but I really wished you would have listened to me.” I told him, hoping to guilt trip into doing what I wanted from that day onwards.
“No its not okay. I hurt you. You could have died because of me!” As if he could kill me. In fact, I was more prone to dying because of my disregard for my own health than because of his actions.
“I could have. But I didn’t. And I heard you were the most concerned of all. If you promise me to listen to my warning next time, I´ll gladly forget everything that happened.” I said and put my gloved hand on his shoulder and looked him deep into the eyes.
“Thank you … and yes I promise to listen to you from now on.” Breathing out happily, I smiled at him and pulled him towards me to hug him tightly.
“No matter what others say, your heart is at the right place.” I said and let go of him shortly afterwards. Our hug didn’t last long at all, but it was enough for him to be completely overwhelmed by his emotions.
“Now, I´m not the kind of teacher who thinks every rule is necessary, but your homeroom teacher is. Are you sure you want to stick around any longer?” Hannah asked while staring at him strictly.
“No … mam. And thank you.” He said, bowed deeply and ran away right away. I chuckled a bit as he could possibly still hear me, but that died down soon enough. Balling my hands to fists, I imagined punching him until he wouldn’t move anymore.
But I quickly shook my head as doing so would hamper my plans somewhat. At least the reason for my newfound hatred for him had a positive side effect. He would listen to me at least somewhat, because he knew very well he couldn’t risk such a horrible incident a second time.
After our little conversation, Hannah and I were free to go wherever we wanted and directly used that opportunity to get to the merchants guild. Apparently, they didn’t have that large of a branch in this town as they shared the same building with the adventurers guild. Well, this town was a hot tourist location for wealthy nobles which allowed it to have all kinds of buildings like theatres but otherwise it wasn’t that special.
The surroundings were quite calm as well so there weren’t many adventurers around as we stepped into the shared buildings. Hannah directly walked over to them in an attempt to gather intel about the abandoned mine while I strolled over to the sole receptionist.
“Hello. Ehh, I need this letter to be delivered to the capital rather quickly.” I explained and put the letter onto the counter.
“Sure thing. Just fill out this form and the next merchant travelling east will take it with him.” The receptionist explained and reached beneath the wooden plate to retrieve a form and a feather with ink. After filling out the first few blank spaces, I quickly stumbled across a problem though.
“What’s a client code?” I asked the receptionist in a little bit of worry. I always despised bureaucracy because it tended to stay in the way of so many simple things.
“That’s a code which identifies you personally. If you acted in bad faith for example and asked us to deliver anything illegal, we could block you from requesting anything else everywhere.” Or they could keep track of their clients in a simpler way. The only issue was probably to ensure that every branch had their information updated regularly.
“That’s neat. Where do I get one?” I asked quickly. If it was a decentralised system anyway, there shouldn’t be a problem making one right away.
“Right here. It costs twenty gold coins though.” These muggers! Twenty gold coins to get a bit of bureaucracy done? They were basically robbing me in broad daylight! These pitiful adventurers in the other side of the room were paid in silver coins for their quests, so how were they ever going to pay to register in the first place?
Or the merchant’s guild only focused rich customers with their services, which would make sense as well. A poor person would never want to send a letter because frankly speaking, he simply didn’t knew outside the place he lived in. Those travelling were either strong enough, in which case they could pay for this service at one point, or they were filthy rich. The thing was … I didn’t want to spend twenty gold coins to have a letter delivered.
“Hannah?” I asked after turning around. She was with the other adventurers around a table with something dead on it. Maybe it was an invasive specials or something, because there wasn’t much reason for a dead animal to gather that much attention.
“Coming!” She said back and jogged over to us right away. She only needed to look on the form a second until she realised the problem. “Can we do it under my name?”
“Sure thing.” The receptionist presented her with an identical form which she directly filled out. Strangely enough, the receptionist didn’t even flinch as she left the space for her family name blank. “Thank you very much.”
“It’s been a pleasure.” Hannah said and nodded over towards the group of adventurers. “You might want to check that out.”
After nodding in silence, we strolled over to them. At first, I couldn’t even see what they were all looking at as their bodies blocked my view. But as Hannah cleared her throat a little, they directly made place for her and me.
“Mam? What do you think?” The bulkiest one of the bunch asked right away, pointing towards a mouse in a cage. That animal was dead for sure, at least that’s what my godly senses told me. It’s belly was also ripped open quite brutally and it stank horribly of rotten flesh. For all I knew, that thing was dead. And yet it moved.
Frantically, it threw itself against the cage relentlessly, trying to do something against the metal bars which it was obviously unable to.
“It’s … dead?” I mumbled in a little bit of confusion. My magic to resurrect everything around me wasn’t of for too long. That mouse should have been resurrected by me, but it still lacked a soul. If I forced it, I would be able to put the old one back into the mouse, but my spell was meant for easy targets, not dead creatures already under control of someone else.
“It’s undead.” One of the adventurers said as if I was dumb. Glancing over to him, I could see him grin at me which only served to underline his position, but didn’t change the fact that in fact it was him who was dumb.
The creatures I created were undead … but not these things. They were merely a husk of their former selves with no personality to speak of. It was an inferior version of what I could do because my creations had intelligence befitting of their past race while these things were completely dumb.
Snipping against the cage arrogantly, the mouse was put into another frenzy right away as it tried to bite my finger at all costs.
“Who would raise undead creatures … and who could do such a thing?”
“A necromancer.” Necromancy wasn’t exactly forbidden, but it always led to the same results. A husk overwhelmed by their instincts. And most of these instincts were inherently harmful to humans, which meant it was indirectly a criminal act to use necromancy. You could still study it of course, but only if you have a solid reasoning why you want to research the dead.
“That’s a grim future ahead.” Truly, none of these adventurers were happy about the prospect of a fight, but rather worried about themselves. With a necromancer on the loose, everything could happen to those venturing out of the town.
“You should request the help of an S-class adventurer at least. I fear the town won’t be able to hold without if that person has any malicious intent.” Hannah proposed and was quickly met with nodding from all humans around the table.
“Well do that … and if we are attacked before that, we’ll beat that bastard ourselves.” Well, that was certainly a way to make sure to be the first one to die … but alright. I wouldn’t stop him. Well, it wasn’t really our time to butt in, so we left the building after saying goodbye to the group. We didn’t head straight home though, but rather searched the whole town for a useful book.
“That wasn’t one of yours, right?” Hannah asked back in her room while I took my time to read the very few books about necromancy the towns bookshops had … which was exactly one book.
“No. I ordered mine to keep hidden and play dead.” I answered a bit distracted by the book.
“I see … the next S-rank adventurer is in a city three days to the north.” And because of my luck, I seriously doubted he or she would get to this town in time.
“It doesn’t matter how long that adventurer needs. That necromancer is twenty kilometres to the north.” I explained right away. If that person wanted to mess around, he would do so in the next few days.
“How do you know that?” Well, I knew because I could feel it. I couldn’t tell what my creations were experiencing at all. The most I could do was to give them orders fitting for their intelligence, and tell if they are still in existence or not.
“Because all my creations there are gone. That person really has a knack for privacy.” And a way for him to find my creations … which was much more concerning.
