First Day at Adventure High, Part 2

As I was saying previously, a pair of fangs protruded out of the upper lip of her deathly pale face, leading me to the conclusion our Realmsverse History teacher was a freaking vampire, which, in retrospect, was an interesting choice for faculty. Mistress Ravenloft could educate us with a unique firsthand perspective of history while also being a constant threat to the teenage blood bags attending her classes.

Sadly, we didn't get any tales of blood pirates or realm conquistadors during this session. Thanks to Brunhilde going postal on Loghan, we novices spent the rest of the class cleaning up their mess. Mistress Ravenloft called it, "Shared responsibility," and no one was brave enough to challenge the curly blonde vampire's orders for fear of getting our blood sucked out of us.

I stayed in the Great Library for lunch since Liara was nowhere to be found and I didn't fancy trekking back to the tower just to eat with Zen and the gang. Besides, the special section was just a stack down, and I didn't think Mistress Grimsever minded me invading it again. She didn't. We spent lunch discussing the merits of protection charms against mid-tier black magic while also riffing on Divah who I just discovered was in the same mage class as Mistress Grimsever back when they were both novices of the Academy.

"Did she really steal Master Dwalinn's staff so she could use it as a lightning rod to summon Thor to the Academy?" I recounted one of Divah's far-fetched stories about summoning a god to campus so she could steal his fancy magical belt.

"She didn't get Thor. She roped in one of his goats instead," Mistress Grimsever revealed, chuckling as she did.

"That's even funnier," I said, laughing afterward.

"Speaking of unconventional novices … I hear you're proving to be just as much a rule flaunter as that wily dragon," Mistress Grimsever noted. "More stew?"

I ate the goat stew she offered me with relish while also promising that she could expect me to top Divah's records and shenanigans. "I'm go'on du' big'er stu—;"

I choked on that chunk of goat that got caught in my throat, prompting the amiable half-orc to share some of her special tea with me.

"How very much like your master you are, Mr. Wisdom… She liked to speak with food in her mouth too," Mistress Grimsever chuckled.

Since we mostly shared the same apprentice schedule, Dess and I met up outside Seidr Longhouse, the large building on the eastern side of campus's central garden. From there, Dess led me past a ten-foot round entrance and into a spacious interior with a high vaulted ceiling, wooden panel walls decked in colorful banners, and a stone floor peppered with a series of arcane configurations ranging from protective magical arrays to summoning circles and even runic graffiti about silly stuff like, "Call Barbatos for all your feminine tantric needs," I read aloud.

I stared down at a long shape carved into the floor underneath the runic symbols that translated into the Chirper ID 'Barbatos69.' "Is that…?"

"Yep, it's a phallus," Dess replied indifferently. "Seidr Longhouse is all about self-expression."

Smoke wafted out of the altar at the far end of Seidr Longhouse's entry hall, sending the scent of lavender to hang in the air. Interestingly, most important places smelled of lavender or frankincense, aromas known to repel evil and negative thoughts. Supposedly. But, as I stepped over Barbatos69 and his dick drawing, I assumed lavender couldn't beat out a teenager's inner caveman at all.

Dess took me past more funny graffiti and through another set of side doors that led into a corridor with walls that looked like the inner workings of a watch; rotating metal cogs and screws and brass piping with ticking sounds reverberating all around us.

"Groovy," I whispered.

"Sure, if you don't mind stinking like motor oil for the rest of the day," Dess piped up.

She shoved her way past the clusters of green, blue, and red cloaks clogging up the corridor and took me into a room that looked normal compared to the hallway we'd just come from.

Chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling lit up a typical laboratory space that had two lines of long tables arrayed in front of a blackboard at the other end of the room. The lab equipment was also standard fare; Dwarf burners, black cauldrons, brass beakers, silver filters, and potion vials—everything a budding mad alchemist might need to bottle fame, mix fortune into a salve, or just blow stuff up. The Apprentice Alchemy's master, however, was more in line with what I now believed was the Academy's preference in faculty.

Underneath his lab coat, Doctor Faustus was all rotting skin and yellowing bones with twin orbs of ghostly flame bursting out of his empty eye sockets. Yep, you guessed it, the master of Apprentice Alchemy was a draugr, and a weird one too. Apart from the way his rotten tongue kept licking at his lips, Faustus seemed quite docile for a card-carrying member of what many considered one of the evilest species in all the realmsverse.

"Hello, living beings." His warm welcome was strangely energetic for an undead. "I see we've got some new faces today. What's your name?"

No, he wasn't pointing at me. He was pointing at Dess who was sitting beside me.

"I'm Dess, Doc," she answered eagerly. Then she leaned in to whisper in my ear, "Faustus's rotting brain makes him forget the small stuff. So, it helps to double-check the formulas he writes down on the board before we begin experiments."

"Good to know," I whispered back.

Faustus asked some more novices their names before he went on to explain today's assignment, which he likened to putting a temporary stopper on death. "It's not as good as concocting an elixir of eternal life, but what we'll create today will keep you alive in a hard fight!"

A novice raised his hand.

"Yes?" Faustus nodded.

I recognized the human who'd just gotten up. He was the blue cloak I spoke to back at P.E. The one who was shaking in his booties while the red cloaks marched at us.

He was lanky—seriously, why are most people in this Academy so freaking tall—and had short-cropped brown hair parted at the side. His face was thin and narrow. Thick dark eyebrows rose over big doe brown eyes and a long pointy nose marked by freckles.

"Um, we've only started learning the theory of healing items… I don't think anyone's ready to, um, put a stopper in death, sir," the scaredy-cat stated.

Yes, I did just give him a crappy nickname which I will continue to call him until he proved me wrong. No, I wasn't being mean. It's not like I called him that out loud—yet.

"Do you always take things so literally, uh"—Faustus frowned—"what was your name?"

"Bart, sir," scaredy-cat answered.

"Ah, yes, Bartholomew, I remember now," Faustus said absentmindedly. "As I was saying… What was I saying again?"

"Putting a stopper in death, doc," Dess piped up.

"Ah yes, um…" he eyed Dess questioningly.

"Dess," she supplied.

"Yes, yes… thank you, Desdemona," He nodded wearily. "As I was saying, we will be making health potions!"

He tapped his fingers on the board that contained the formula for mixing a standard health potion, which I, after reading it once, realized was wrong. The formula Faustus had written down was for a famous poison called 'Waking Death.' It was advanced-level alchemy even I couldn't concoct yet.

I pointed this out to him quickly as I noticed some of my fellow novices were already beginning preparations to make the thing that would have most likely ended in paralyzing them until they received the antidote, a rare salve called 'True Love's First Kiss.'

"Really?" Faustus glanced back at the board. Long seconds later, he exclaimed, "By the hoary ghost, you're right!"

It took him another two tries, but he eventually wrote down the right formula for a lesser healing potion, which was honestly less groovy than that poison he'd first shown us.

I would have loved to try my skills on concocting a powerful poison—one could never have enough of those hidden in one's sleeve—but the lame-o assignment did offer me a chance to show off, which is exactly what I did, and it would result in one of the freakiest encounters I would ever have in a class.