BLOOD CURSE ACADEMIA - PREVIOUS DRAFT EDITION -

Chapter XXXIX (39)- Infiltration of the 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 from rare, experimental, magical wines were far more elusive than the normal type. The second attempt had actually made the headache worse. He had to lay under his blankets and writhe in pain for half an hour before it subsided back to its old pain.

“Heard you got lucky after I helped you out,” Basil said, the door closing behind him. 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 head did not jive well with them at the moment.

Mort hummed from his bed in the rafters and looked down at them in amusement.

“I agree,” Basil said to the monkey. “Kizu needs to drink more often. The better you hold your alcohol, the better you 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. The drumming of 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 protests away with a hand. “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 on Kizu’s stomach for the entire rest of the day. The headache might be gone, but it was replaced by his mind trying to come up with every little detail that could go wrong with his infiltration. It seemed so stupid. He should just ask one of the fourth year girls. But 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 to spot anything that might jog his memory. He was still considering it as he went on to his classes for the day.

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

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. Really bare bones basic meanings.

“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 killed 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 job, it can cost you your life.”

“Glad I don’t have the habit,” Harvey said looking down at his hands. “I already could see Professor Knoff accidently getting one of us killed without other additional 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 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?”

Kizu felt like he was going crazy. But Professor Grove turned toward them 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 try 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 freetime now that he was avoiding the student body. Maybe reading?

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 traceability on his spells. But today he needed it.

Then he went to the library and found an isolated corner. There he weaved a complex illusion he had been practicing. He overlaid it on his 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, he appeared like a bland looking Hon girl wearing a girl’s academy uniform. He would have liked to have made himself look like a Tainted or even 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 though, he highly doubted anyone would recognize the resemblance to himself. And the illusion should hold perfectly, 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 through sight. Kizu recognized the perfume as one he’d used before. He had even listened to Kizu’s advice and lacked his usual over the top flair. He looked like an average girl from Tross. He even exhibited enough self restraint to opt out of having majestic rainbow hair, instead sporting a dull dark blue bob. The only distinguishing mark on him was a mole jutting out from under his right chin.

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

Kizu considered that, then he altered his illusion slightly, changing the color of a lock of hair to be 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 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 set in the distance, casting beams of orange hues across the sky.

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

And 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 to be the common room. What appeared at a glance to be the largest of the buildings. There was a warm stove in the middle 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 undetected by spells and enchantments. He thought it would, but still let out a held breath.

Basil stepped through the painting. He tilted his head at Kizu slightly, obviously wondering how he had gotten through with only an illusion, but he 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 it actually transported them to a different location owned by the academy. If he jumped in the water, would he find land if he swam long enough?

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

The inside of the dorm was significantly less cluttered than the one Kizu shared with Basil. Everything appeared pristinely 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 wasn’t part of 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. It only took scanning 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 just 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 hid under. It strained slightly under her weight, but thankfully not so much that it touched Kizu.

Her feet dangled in front of Kizu as she laid on her bed.

After waiting for several minutes, Kizu began to realize 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 apparently 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. And naturally, Basil had omitted that tidbit when suggesting this idea.

The diary was actually enchanted, having far more pages than the small book’s size suggested. Which would be interesting if not 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 first started studying at Wave Edge Academy. Apparently she had been distressed about the sheer amount of junk in her room but for some reason was extremely hesitant to bring it up with the faculty. He actually found several snide comments about the faculty in general, but never noticed any real reason for the animosity. Instead, her original solution appeared to be that she intended to move out of the dorms altogether once she finished her first year. And in the meantime, she had just avoided the room completely to keep it out of her mind. But then, towards the end of the year, she 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 decided to stay in the dorms another year.

Kizu skimmed the section where she mooned over a boy he highly suspected to be 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 excreted clear pus and moaned. Not moaning like in a good way, like in a ‘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. I ran away 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. The clear pus got all over my sheets though. The sight of it will forever be seared into my retinas. It might be washed now, but I still can’t sleep in them. I don’t know what to 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 say he’s gone forever.

That, apparently, was the catalyst for her massive purge of everything in her room. She discovered that the academy takes donations. After asking around, she found out all the things would have been removed on her arrival if she’d mentioned them to a faculty member. It was some sort of clerical error in the system that they resulted in it not being removed before her arrival. Kizu suspected that the error 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 home.

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

Carefully, he weaved a new illusion. This one significantly more complicated than the overlay of a student. It required an in depth examination of the room. Once he thought he had a good grasp on what the far wall looked like, he took a deep breath and rolled out from under the bed. As he did so, he immediately accidentally knocked into one of the girl’s dangling feet.

She jolted awake in a start. 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 depicted the room as empty as ever. After a moment she mumbled something and fell back onto her bed, obviously put at ease by her surroundings.

His illusion wasn’t perfect. It acted more like camouflage than real invisibility. Kizu slowly eased his way across the room, clinging to the wall the entire time. The girl didn’t stir, but Kizu wanted to minimize the risk of waking her again as much as possible.

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 lot more difficult. There were no walls for him to hug so his camouflage illusion wouldn’t work. Instead, he shifted back to his generic fourth year looking girl that he 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 them if they got close. He resolved to keep his distance.

That resolution lasted an entire ten steps.

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

He glanced over to see Basil in a darkened doorway. He also looked like his earlier disguise. He grabbed Kizu’s arm and pulled 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 morning. 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 with wooden crates and janitorial supplies.

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

“I doubt it,” Kizu said glumly. “Aoi’s journal made it sound like the academy faculty completely removed everything.”

“Her journal? You read her diary?”

“Yes.”

“The little book with pink flowers over a 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 his necklace. But he just shrugged. It felt foolish to let Basil know about the enchanted necklace. There wasn’t a real reason to keep it a secret, but he also didn’t see a reason to blab about it unnecessarily.

“It talked about you quite a bit,” Kizu said, trying to remove 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. I’ve thought about trying again with a different look. But then it would be difficult remembering what she did and didn’t say to me. Better to stay away from any real relationships altogether.”

“She thinks you’re dead.”

“Really?” Basil sounded actually 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. I stopped trying to hide it after my first year here.”

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

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

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

After giving up on discovering anything, he sat back against the wall, considering a nap, when the supplies leapt to life all around him. Mops and brooms pivoted from their resting places and hopped out onto the boardwalk with buckets suddenly filled with soapy water trailing after them.

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