Alice Angel of Mercy

I walked around for a while buying various things. I had time to kill before heading back to school. Our plan was for me to sneak in the backdoor during shift change. While the school offered jobs to the student body "to build character" the fact was almost every job was done by hired help.

When the time got closer, I headed back. The backdoor wasn’t like the front entrance. There was no grand archway or shiny cobbled path that made it look like you were walking into a fantasy. Instead, it was a set of thick double doors with cheap pebbles forming the path into the school. I saw two guards stationed by the doors, as I stood in the line that had formed. We were all waiting for them to open.

They opened the doors and people began to file out on one side of the doors, while the other side filed in. I didn't notice at first but the guards were running a purple rod over a card that the people held. I was too close to do anything about it though. If I left, they may remember this form and, even if I got a card later, I might not be able to get in. I decided to try and bluff my way in. With that curse of not being able to lie, the chances were slim to none that I would be able to pull it off but I had to try. The only way I would get in this way was if the guard was a fool or if I got lucky. The closer I got the more I could see that the guard was extremely professional.

'Rabbits are lucky right?' I thought trying to give myself a pep talk. Step by Step, as I got closer and closer, I kept thinking similar thoughts until I heard a ding and a message popped up *Activate Luck Yes/No*. I desperately thought yes and I saw my luck stats value dim and beside the four, a three appeared in parentheses. Beside that, a ten minute timer appeared along with 100% that also was decreasing along with the timer.

I saw my luck was diminishing every six seconds and by the time I got up to the doors, the percent was down at 83%. I was nervous, I didn't know what was going to happen. My nervousness translated to me hopping from one foot to the other sending parts of me jiggling. Even so, the guard ignored my body and went to scan my card, which I didn't have. As the rod approached me, it flickered and went out. I heard the other guard chuckle and gave a mild reprimand, "I told you not to show off last night. Now, look at you. Your magic energy is spent." I saw the guy blush with embarrassment which he refocused into anger at me.

He looked over at me and said, "Look, she doesn't even have a card." The guard with a smile on his face replied, "You know how these young masters are. Look at how she's dressed, she's obviously here for a certain kind of work. Just let her through. Otherwise, we will have to deal with an angry noble and you know how that works. I need my job."

With a grunt, the angry guard waved me in. I hadn't taken more than three steps before I heard him say in a snarky tone, "Nobles and their pets." With a stiff back, I just kept moving. This is not the time. I needed a place to change, quickly. I looked around and noticed an empty shack. It was probably used to hold tools for lawn care or something of that nature. I made my way over there and once I noticed that nobody was around, slipped inside. I let go of the spell and changed my clothes.

By the time I was done, the timer had made its way to zero. The timer disappeared but my luck percent that briefly showed zero went to negative twenty percent and wasn't moving! Shit! I was so focused on that negative number, that when I tried to get out, I ended up knocking over a bunch of rakes. This caused a ruckus while dust went everywhere. By the time I got out, my eyes were watering so badly that I didn't see the protruding stone on the trail that led to the dorms.

The pain in my foot was making my eyes tear up more. I calmed myself down, healed my foot and carefully returned to the dorms. It seemed my luck had turned for the worse. After that debacle, I was careful so not much happened and I managed to get to the dorms without further calamities. I let a sigh out as I entered the dorms. The tension, from worrying about what kind of bad things could happen, leaving me. Flexing my shoulders and standing a bit taller, I made my way to the stairs. “Alice, what luck. I have been looking all over for you,” I heard Princess Amelia’s maid call out to me.

"Oh?" Maybe my luck isn't all bad. The last time we met they had snacks and both the Princess and Penelope were extremely nice. Especially, considering she believed her brother was trying to marry me along with her friend. It was just weird to me. I was taught, by my mother, to love only one person and while I haven't found that special somebody yet, it didn't mean I had stopped looking.

"I was asked to invite you to my lady's room. It's a bit of a personal matter so she would appreciate it if you could make time. Would now be convenient?"

"…" What could I say? That I just wanted to go to my room because I felt like the sword of Damocles was hanging over my head as long as my luck value was negative. Still my room or hers shouldn’t matter, since both should be safe. I also might be able to grab some snacks while I am there. “Sure, I guess. It should be ok.”

And that is how I ended up in a princess’s room. I thought my room was ok. It gave enough room to move around and even had a small balcony that I could grow plants. Then I walked into her “room” which was on the second floor so she didn’t have to climb the stairs. I expected it to be on the top floor but being lower in the building seemed to be how one showed status here. Of course, the sheer size of the room was enough to do that just fine. It was at least ten times bigger that my room. ‘Life was truly unfair sometimes,’ I thought with a chuckle.

I was feeling better. As I entered her room, the negative twenty percent by my “Luck” stat went away. Amelia was sitting with Penelope and two other girls calmly talking about classes and other things. She calmly finished her conversation and stood up with a practiced grace that made me envious. Even though she turned to me, she did it in such a way that it felt like the others were somehow still included in everything she was doing. “Thank goodness, she found you. These poor ladies are in need of your expertise.” She drew my attention to the two girls that had been sitting across from her. When she got up they, had naturally, stood as well. I had been so focused on the princess I had missed the fact that they were the girls that lived to the right and left of me. I didn’t know their names, but after months of being here I naturally had seen them enough to know that much. “I know that you have been working at the medical center and since they are reluctant to go, I naturally thought of you. Would you be a dear and see if you could discover what ails them? They have been ‘suffering’ for over a week now. You can use one of my side rooms to examine them, so you will have all the privacy you need.”

I had a vision of me marrying her brother as she was talking. It wasn’t a grand marriage. It was more like what I thought a fancy elopement might look like. I tried to ignore it and focus on her request. I looked at the girls again and focused on their displays. Neither had any wounds, poisons, or diseases. The only thing that I noticed was they were currently both fertile but that happens from time to time. I would see girls displaying it every now and again. Every month a girl’s window would show that they were fertile. It simply varied from hours to days based off their bodies but it was a natural process so why did these two need to see a doctor? Then I remembered the prostitutes. Perhaps it was just my guilty feelings, but I noticed that Penelope hadn’t said anything and was instead just staring at me. It looked as though she was scrutinizing my every move.

I went into a side room and checked over the two girls, one at a time. I had them lift their shirts and looked them over. They had a glow about them and as I looked really close I saw two spots that glowed a bit more where their ovaries were. Their spots were not as bright as when I made Professor Peach fertile. I asked about symptoms just to confirm and they told me that they woke up in the morning, about a week ago, thinking of their fiancés. Their ‘thinking’ of them hasn’t gone away since then. They told me this in a roundabout way, with their blushing faces I understood. I then had them link with my display and saw that they each had ‘Fertile’ displayed with a timer. Each of their timers held different times. My guess was that was when their periods would come, negating whatever magic was in effect.

After I counseled the girls and let them know that their desire would fade with the time, I ended up eating with the Princess and Penelope. The other girls had fled as soon as I finished. I was going to go as well but was invited to eat with them before I could escape. The food was exquisite. Her maid had brought it up to us instead of us going to dine out. The topics they discussed were light. It was the visions that were making me uneasy. Different hazy visions of Penelope ordering a maid to poison my food, of her stabbing me in my extremely pregnant belly, and so on. Each vision was worse than the other. I didn’t understand. I looked at her smiling face and wondered if these were her real thoughts. If so, she was way too scary. Was she a white lotus?

I left as soon as dinner was over. They wanted to me to stay but after that dinner I wasn’t in the mood. I was pretty sure that those visions were true. I just haven’t figured out why they came so sporadically. I didn’t relax until I got back to my room. I knew what I did a week ago. The thought that exploring my body might have somehow made the people that lived close to me fertile and ‘in the mood’ was disconcerting, at least to me.

I resolved to not do “that” until I understood what was going on. The weekend would begin tomorrow and I would need to finish the mission and get back to school within those two days. I should be sleeping but my mind was going a mile a minute. I went to shower off the dust, change and try to calm down. On the way back I slipped a note under Lilly's door letting her know I was going out on a mission and I needed them to cover for me. By the time I was done I was calmer but still couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed and began to practice “Spell Crafting”. Unlike most of my other skills I didn’t need materials or to physically do anything. So I have begun to try and understand how my spells were made. Some like “Aid” were very straightforward while others were so complex that I didn’t even know where to start. I had already decided that once I leveled it up to journeyman level with practice, I would use the reward I got from the contest to level it up one more time to get it to talented. It was just too useful of a skill not to do it.

It wasn’t until one that I finally fell asleep