Blood Curse Academia - Orientation

Chapter XXXIX (39)- Girls' Dormitory

Kizu felt horrible. He had heard of hangovers, but never experienced one before. His brain pounded in his skull as he mashed an herb with his mortar and pestle. It was his third attempt at a cure. Apparently hangover cures for rare, experimental, magical wines were far more elusive than the normal variety. His second attempt had actually made the headache worse. He’d had to lay under his blankets and writhe in pain for half an hour before it subsided enough to think.

“Heard you got lucky after I helped you out,” Basil said, waltzing into their dorm. He whistled as he approached. “Honestly, I was surprised to find you in your bed last night.”

Kizu just groaned and continued mashing the herb with new vigor. He had mostly gotten used to the tirade of scents that accompanied Basil everywhere, but his headache did not jive well with them at the moment.

Mort hummed from his bed in the rafters, looking down on them with amusement.

“I agree,” Basil said to the monkey. “Kizu needs to drink more often. The better you can hold your alcohol, the better you’ll manage the hangover later.”

Kizu doubted that statement but said nothing. He snorted the powdered herbs. Immediately, his mind focused, his thoughts felt clearer than they had in weeks, and most importantly, the drumming pain inside his head faded.

“You look happy,” Basil commented. “Mind sharing?”

“It’s just for my head. I doubt I’d make it to classes today, otherwise.” He poured the extra into a small pouch.

“Stingy bastard,” Basil mumbled. “And here I was going to offer to infiltrate with you tonight.”

“You mean the fourth year’s dorms?”

“Yes. The fourth year’s girl’s dorms. But if you’re not willing to share….”

Kizu sighed and tossed him the sack. Basil grinned as he pocketed it.

“I’d be careful,” Kizu warned. “I don’t know how it will affect someone that’s not human.”

Basil waved his warning away. “I’m human enough, I’m sure. So where do you want to meet?”

“Outside the library?” Kizu suggested.

“Fine with me. We’ll meet there as soon as dinner starts and head over. Make sure you leave your scrying orb behind. The academy can track us through those.”

Kizu blinked. He hadn’t known that. He supposed it made sense, though.

“It’s under my bed.” It had been there for over a week. He knew his way around the academy well enough without it and his eyes never needed a lightsource.

“Good, leave it there and I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Nervousness gnawed at Kizu for the rest of the day. The headache might have been gone, but in its place, his mind had been filled to bursting with possible failure scenarios. It seemed so stupid, this grand infiltration plan of theirs. He should just ask one of the fourth year girls to do some snooping on his behalf. Unfortunately, he had no guarantee that they’d be honest, or even know what to look for. For that matter, Kizu didn’t really know what to look for himself. It was best that he went in person, in case he spotted something that jogged his memory. He was still considering it as he went through his classes for the day.

“You’re biting your fingernails,” Harvey said, breaking Kizu from his latest spiral.

“Oh, I guess I am.” Kizu had started doing it absentmindedly. He thought he’d gotten rid of that habit years ago. It always popped up at the most random times. The crone had physically beaten it out of him soon after kidnapping him. In hindsight, it made sense as a brewer to not be sticking things in his mouth, but he struggled to scrounge up any gratitude for the old woman’s methods.

They were in astronomy, a class where Kizu barely had anything at all to distract himself. Professor Grove was teaching about the significance of different constellations. Bare bones, basic stuff. It was dangerously easy for his mind to wander while looking up at the mock stars above them.

“I had a cousin who used to bite his nails,” Harvey said. “He was a bard. Actually the one who bought me my first flute. He plays, like, every instrument. He told me that biting his nails almost ended his career early on though. Really hard to pick strings without any nails.”

“Same sort of problem as a brewer,” Kizu said. “Except instead of a career, it can cost you your life.”

“Glad I never got into the habit.” Harvey looked down at his hands. “I can already see Professor Knoff getting one of us killed without adding on to the hazards.”

“What do you think of Knoff?” Kizu asked. The professors continued to change between the fanatical one for the practical potions lessons, and the kindly one for the theory and textbook lessons. Nobody had ever explained why there were two different professors, and when he tried to ask the professor directly in his last class, he had just cackled madly at him.

“Depends on the day,” Harvey admitted. “He definitely… scares me sometimes.”

“Do you know why there are two different professors?”

“Two professors? What do you mean?”

Maybe he was going crazy. But before he could clarify, Professor Grove turned and bobbed in their direction.

“Forget it,” Kizu mumbled.

To be honest, he was a bit bummed to have their conversation cut short so quickly. That was the longest he’d spoken to Harvey since the matches two weeks prior. He intended to pick it back up after class, but the Tainted boy hurried off in a different direction as soon as the bell rang. Kizu wondered what he was doing with all his free time now that he’d given up on being popular. Maybe reading?

He considered pursuing his friend, but it was almost time to meet with Basil. He focused on what he needed to do. First, he stopped by his room and picked up his enchanted amulet. He usually avoided bringing it out in public, worried that someone might notice the lack of presence to his spells, but today he needed it.

Thus prepared, he went to the library and found an empty corner. There, he weaved a complex illusion he had been practicing. He overlaid it on his own body, carefully matching different aspects of the illusion to his limbs. Taking out a hand mirror, he scrutinized the illusion. Now, if anyone looked at him, they’d see a bland Hon girl wearing a proper girl’s academy uniform. He would have liked to have made himself look like a Tainted, or maybe someone from Tross, just to distance himself from his origin as much as possible, but he wasn’t as familiar with their looks and this way he could build off characteristics he already had. Even still, he highly doubted anyone would recognize the resemblance to himself. And the illusion should hold as long as he wanted it to, as long as he didn’t ever run or brush against anyone.

He rounded the corner and waited for Basil, doing his best to look absorbed with a notice on the wall. In reality, he was discreetly watching the other students as they walked by. Nobody paid him any mind, which reassured him a bit.

Basil was recognizable immediately. Thankfully, though, not on sight. Kizu recognized the perfume as one he’d used before. His roommate had even listened to Kizu’s advice and foregone his usual over the top flair. He looked like an average girl from Tross. He’d even had enough self restraint to opt out of majestic rainbow hair, instead sporting a dull, dark blue bob. The only distinguishing mark on him was a mole jutting out from under his chin.

“People will focus on that,” Basil explained when Kizu asked him about it. “Often, the best disguises will have something odd about them. Instead of remembering someone’s entire look, people will just remember that easily changed detail.”

Kizu considered that, then he altered his illusion slightly, changing the color of a lock of hair to stark white.

“Fancy potion,” Basil commented. “I’ve never heard of one that lets you change the results on a whim.”

“It’s an illusion.”

Basil looked at him quizzically. “You know that won’t work, right? When you enter the dormitories, the entrance will reject you. You need to change your actual body structure. Your age doesn’t even match what’s permitted inside, let alone your gender.”

“It’s fine,” Kizu said, trying to sound confident in his strategy. “Brewing a potion can be traced back to me. What I’m doing can’t be.”

Basil shook his head but started walking down the corridor all the same. “Okay, but you’re stepping into the dorms first.”

The fourth year’s girl’s dormitory entrance was a painting of a cluster of bamboo buildings on stilts over a placid emerald sea. The sun was setting in the distance, casting beams of orange light across the sky.

Kizu took a deep breath and pressed his hand against the painting.

He passed straight through it. The air freshened and a calming breeze rippled the water slightly outside the window. He stood in what he assumed was the common room, in what appeared at a glance to be the largest of the dorm buildings. There was a warm stove in the middle of the room, surrounded by cushioned bamboo benches and chairs. Thankfully, nobody seemed to be inside. He had feared immediately being chased off by a student who knew all her fourth year peers on sight.

Kizu looked down at himself. His illusion still held. No alarms sounded. Everything remained as calm as ever. His necklace had nullified whatever security system they used. It kept him untraceable and undetectable by spells and enchantments. He’d thought it would, but still let out a breath of relief.

Basil stepped through the painting. He tilted his head and cocked an eyebrow at Kizu, obviously wondering how he had gotten through with only an illusion, but kept his questions to himself. Instead, he grinned and pointed in the direction they needed to go.

They crossed the boardwalk that connected the common room house to what appeared to be the dorm room huts. They were lined up to their left and right with the ocean behind them, spread across the horizon as far as the eye could see. Kizu marveled at the dormitory. He wondered if it was a pocket dimension, or if they’d actually been transported to a different location owned by the academy. If he jumped in the water, would he find land if he swam long enough? He found spatial spellcraft so fascinating.

“Here,” Basil said, stopping at a hut on their right. He wiggled the door handle. Locked. He glanced over his shoulder, before a moment later his body bubbled and morphed. It changed into a different girl, this one far prettier, with a smoother face and long black hair tied back in braids. This time, the door unlocked with a click when he touched it.

The inside of the dorm was significantly less cluttered than the one Kizu shared with Basil. Everything was pristine, clean and organized. Kizu commented on that fact to Basil.

“It definitely lacks the character of our place,” Basil huffed.

“You mean, it lacks six-hundred different outfits.”

“Exactly!”

Kizu felt like an intruder as he shuffled through the girls’ things. Which, he realized, was exactly what he was. The guilt of that realization didn’t shake his conviction, though. Their clothing drawers, however, very much did. Thankfully, Basil offered to take over with those. He claimed he would be able to immediately recognize anything that stood out from their usual fashion.

While searching through the nightstand drawers, he found a small book. He flipped through it. Everything was handwritten in the Universal Script. He only had to scan a few lines before he realized what it was. A journal.

He opened his mouth to tell Basil about it when the sound of footsteps cut him off. He immediately fell to the floor and rolled under a bed. He pulled himself out of sight right as the door swung open.

“Aoi?” a girl said, surprised. “I thought you said you were headed to the library. Don’t you have a study group in a few minutes?”

“Forgot something,” Basil said, his voice altered into a falsetto. Kizu watched his shoes as he bent over a nightstand. Then he walked out the door, abandoning Kizu.

The girl muttered something to herself, then kicked off her shoes into the corner. She sat down on the bed Kizu was hiding under. It dipped slightly under her weight, but thankfully not so much that it touched Kizu.

Her feet dangled in front of Kizu’s face as she laid back.

After waiting for several minutes, Kizu began to suspect this girl wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Not knowing what else to do, Kizu opened the little diary and started to read. Aoi, the diary’s owner, turned out to be a pretty average student. Well, average if you looked beyond the fact that she was second cousins with the Emperor of Hon, and twenty-third in line for succession. Kizu cursed silently. Of course he would end up robbing a princess. That was exactly his sort of luck. First the sadistic prince at the combat contest, now this. And naturally, Basil had omitted that tidbit when suggesting this heist in the first place.

The diary was actually enchanted, having far more pages than the small book’s size suggested. It would have been interesting if it wasn’t so frustrating. She wrote at least a page every single day, and it looked like she’d started a decade ago. Skipping the front half, he eventually located the passages from when she’d first started studying at Shinzou Academy. Apparently, she had been distressed about the sheer amount of junk in her room, but for some reason had also been extremely hesitant to bring it up with the faculty. He found several snide comments about the faculty in general, but never found an explanation for the animosity. Instead, her original solution to the clutter had been to ignore it until she moved out in her second year. In the meantime, she had avoided the room whenever possible to keep it out of her mind. But then, towards the end of the year, she’d had some sort of argument with her parents - the details weren’t included, but Kizu gathered it had to do with her independence. As a result, she’d decided to stay in the dorms another year.

Kizu skimmed the section where she mooned over a boy he suspected was Basil. The passages he did read from that section made him burn red with embarrassment. Then he got to the section where Basil accidentally fell asleep next to her.

His skin bubbled and popped. He began to excrete a clear, viscous pus, and he moaned. Not moaning in a pleasurable sort of way, but in an ‘I’m melting’ kind of way. Even after I screamed and ran to the other side of the room, it continued. Then he fell apart completely. Like a sack of water with a hole torn in it. I fled the room and found Professor Kateshi. I was crying when I told her what happened. But then she had the gall to roll her eyes! Like she thought I was lying or something. When I got back to my room, all signs of him were gone. That pus remained on my sheets, though. I’ll never forget the sight of it, or the smell. Those sheets might be clean now, but I still can’t sleep in them. I don’t know what I’ll do with them. In all my years of studying, I’ve never seen a death like that before. Nobody will tell me what’s happening. They just tell me that he’s gone forever.

That, apparently, was the catalyst for her purge of everything in her room. She’d discovered that the academy took donations. After asking around, she’d found out all the leftover clutter would have been removed on her arrival if she’d mentioned it to a faculty member. It was some sort of clerical error in the system that had resulted in it not being removed before her arrival. Kizu suspected that the error had occurred because of the unprecedented expulsion of his sister.

So the academy had taken everything. And Aoi seemed to have exactly zero interest in finding out where it went after it left the threshold of her dorm.

He closed the diary. He saw no point in reading further. Another dead end. More pressingly, his current situation looked bad. While he was reading, the girl on the bed had fallen asleep. She snored softly above his head.

Carefully, he wove a new illusion. This one was significantly more complicated than the female student disguise. It required an in-depth examination of the room. Once he thought he had a good enough grasp on what the far wall looked like, he took a deep breath and rolled out from under the bed. As he did, he accidentally knocked his foot into the bedpost, shaking the bed.

She jolted awake, lurching up in alarm. She rubbed bleary eyes and looked around her dorm. Kizu forced himself to stop breathing as she looked straight at him, and straight through him. His illusion made the room look as empty as ever. After a moment, she mumbled something and fell back onto her bed, dismissing it as a wayward dream.

His illusion wasn’t perfect. It acted more like camouflage than true invisibility - if she had a reason to look hard enough for him, she would find him. Kizu slowly eased his way across the room, clinging to the wall the entire time. The girl didn’t stir again, but Kizu took no chances.

His hand on the doorknob, he carefully turned it, opening it ever so slightly. Once the gap was large enough, he slipped through and closed it softly behind him.

Getting across the boardwalk back to the common room hut proved a greater challenge. There were no walls for him to hug, so his camouflage illusion wouldn’t work. Instead, he shifted back to his generic fourth year girl persona that he’d entered with. He added a hat to further obscure his unfamiliar features. Not a perfect solution - the other fourth years wouldn’t recognize him as one of their peers if they got close. He resolved to keep his distance.

That resolution lasted exactly ten steps.

“Kizu!” someone whispered loudly from inside one of the huts.

He glanced over to see Basil in a darkened doorway. He’d dropped his Aoi persona in favor of the plain Tross girl’s face that he’d entered with. He grabbed Kizu’s arm and yanked him inside.

“What-” Kizu started to say.

“Quiet,” Basil cut him off. “This is an empty dorm. I’ve used it dozens of times. We just need to lay low until nighttime. Then we can sneak out and be back in our dorm before dawn. Nobody saw you walking out there, right?”

“I don’t think so.” Kizu shook his head. “Why not just walk out now?”

“There are ten different girls in the common room. Thankfully, this particular dormitory likes to go to bed early.”

Kizu looked around the room. It looked like a storage area, packed wall-to-wall with wooden crates and janitorial supplies.

“You’re welcome to look through the boxes in the meantime,” Basil offered. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll find something in there.”

“I doubt it,” Kizu said glumly. “Aoi’s journal made it sound like the faculty got rid of everything.”

“Her journal? You read her diary?”

“Yes.”

“The little book with pink flowers on it? Baby blue cover?”

“Yes.”

“How did you manage to open the thing? It’s enchanted to only let the writer read the contents.”

Kizu immediately suspected the answer, but he just shrugged. For some reason, it felt foolish to let Basil know about the enchanted necklace. There wasn’t any reason in particular to keep it a secret, but he had a feeling it wouldn’t be wise to blab about it either.

“It talked about you quite a bit,” Kizu said, trying to divert his attention from the subject. “She was really enamored with you.”

“Yeah. I wish I hadn’t fallen asleep in front of her. Really ruined any chance of that relationship working out. I’ve thought about trying again with a different look, but then it would be a whole thing, trying to remember what she did and didn’t say to me before. Better to stay away from romance altogether.”

“She thinks you’re dead.”

“Really?” Basil sounded surprised by the revelation. “And here I thought the ring she wears was to ward me off. Maybe it’s unrelated. I hope she doesn’t blame herself. I just assumed that the faculty told her what I am.”

“Which is?”

“A changeling. I thought that was obvious. Most people still don’t know, but I stopped trying to hide it after my first year here.”

“She thinks you drank an experimental potion or got on a witch’s bad side.” Kizu couldn’t blame Aoi for thinking that. That was exactly the kind of curse the crone would have loved to place on someone. “You should think about reaching out to her.”

Basil actually considered the advice. “Nah. Like I said, I’m no good at real relationships. I’ll stick to what comes easy.”

Despite his doubts that he would find anything, Kizu still looked through the crates. Nothing else vying for his time or attention at the moment. Of course, he found nothing that resembled anything his sister might have owned. Just spare bedding and more cleaning supplies.

After giving up on the venture, he sat back against the wall, considering a nap. Just as he was starting to drift off, the cleaning supplies leapt to life all around him. Mops and brooms pivoted from their resting places and hopped jauntily out onto the boardwalk, accompanied by buckets that were suddenly filled to the brim with soapy water.

“That’s our cue,” Basil said. “Let’s go home.”