Otherworld Academy Vol. 1 Capitulo 21
Chapter 21
Levi ate cold pizza without regret when he woke up. He did notice someone had stolen a slice and when he saw the way Flix was sprawled out with her scaly belly bulging, he had a hunch who it was. She was harder to predict on the food front; some days she seemed to eat constantly, others she wouldn’t eat all day—he assumed it was a reptile thing. Potions class, morning block—displayed across his emblem and he nodded before taking a quick shower. Once that was done, then he dressed in his uniform so he could get going.
He slipped his expanded satchel over his shoulder and then paused. “If I’m going to be doing field and combat trips, I need to get used to this,” he murmured to himself. He removed the satchel and went to his closet to get the tamer’s baldric. He snapped it over his uniform jacket from his left shoulder to right hip, then adjusted it until the lantern sat on his hip. He checked the pouches running up the heavy strap and the vapor vials in their slots. He hadn’t energized the lantern yet—he didn’t have any creatures in stasis. Once he had that piece settled, he slipped his pouch on so it crossed in the opposite direction and picked up his cane. After all the fiddling, his companions had woken, so Flix flew up to land on his shoulder, hissing softly as she looped her tail around his bicep. Zuzan hopped onto the lantern and climbed along the baldric, sniffing as though she were trying to familiarize herself with the rig—or figure out which pouches had snacks.
He shook his head in amusement as he headed out. Today was supposed to be their first attempt at creating a true potion and he was curious about what they might make. He assumed a world of magic had to have things like healing potions and the like. He had enjoyed the chemistry he’d done, though he wasn’t sure magic potions would have a similar feel to them. Levi wrote a note for Glint and slid it under the swamp imp’s door. The walk to Potions was quiet. The students of Fox House moved along their usual routes and Levi didn’t pay much attention to them. Part of him had expected the school to be in an uproar because of the fight. When he stopped to think about it, there was no reason they should be. A few students getting into it wasn’t going to affect the entire student body, and while the whole “Demon Lord” thing was a big deal to him, most of the students probably didn’t have a clue about it. Now if he had punted Darren through several buildings the way he had the dire wolf in his first practical, that might have gotten some people’s attention.
Or just made him feel better.
He was humming to himself as he walked into his Potions class, and he looked around to see most of the students had already gathered at the various stations set up around the room. His eyes turned back to the professor, seeing she was once again face down, asleep at her desk. She really, really likes her sleep, he thought. He adjusted his glasses and took a moment to study her more carefully; it looked like something in her black hair was twitching—which was when he noticed the ear. She had a triangular-shaped, cat ear sticking out of her hair. The ear was flicking back and forth as she snored, and after a moment he realized she was dreaming. My Potions teacher is a cat-girl? he wondered, staring in surprise. No one else seemed all that surprised, and he was glad he could turn his attention to the instruction book in front of him. It let him get the astonishment off his face before he looked back up. He didn’t know why seeing a cat-girl was surprising in a world with literal dragons, but he hadn’t been expecting it. I really did die and get stuck in an anime, he thought as he began sorting through the various bottles left on the table.
While the handwriting was a little wonky, the book’s instructions were extremely precise, and the hand-scribed illustrations made it easy to identify the ingredients he was supposed to be using. Levi paused and looked around, wondering if they were supposed to get going while the teacher was asleep, but no one seemed to be waiting. Zuzan hopped off his shoulder to investigate the book, chittering to herself, and Flix let out a yawn as she went to sleep. Levi shrugged and started to take out the measuring equipment he needed. The stove beneath the cauldron was hooked to a slim brass pipe, and Levi realized it was using gassed mana vapor to run the burner. The wheel to start the flame burning looked like a propane tank, though it let out a steam-like hiss when he cranked it open. He carefully turned the wheel to the third setting, just like the book commanded. The flame didn’t feel particularly hot to him—but it was green, so he wasn’t sure how to rate that. A measuring cup allowed him to add six cups of water. Then he used the bronze stirring ladle to set the water to spinning clockwise.
“Zuzan, these instructions are really specific, aren’t they?” he asked his friend. The squirrel looked up at him and chittered, waving a tiny paw over her head as she rolled onto her rump. “Yeah, I get that, I wouldn’t want poison myself, or explode,” he agreed. He had no idea if Zuzan actually understood what he was doing, but from the comments she’d squeaked out at him, he suspected she was much smarter than most people realized. He took too much away from the sounds she made to relegate her intelligence as just an animal.
He added shredded blue flametongue scale by the teaspoon, then candied claw—not wanting to know who discovered they had to candy an animal part. Using a pair of tweezers, he dropped in six crystals from a glowing gray jar, and each one caused the water to change color. He began to stir, clockwise again, and counted as he did. The book stated he had to stir it precisely seventeen times clockwise, and then once, very slowly, counterclockwise. For some reason the word widdershins was in parentheses—he hoped that just meant counterclockwise, because he had no idea what it meant otherwise. The small cauldron had started producing a violet smoke that was drifting up into the air, so he was careful not to inhale it, though the book didn’t list any dangers in that regard. It did tell him that a seventh crystal would have caused the potion to explode, so he was glad he took the time to count.
More ingredients went into the pot, cauldron, whatever. Levi kept careful track of what steps he was on; Zuzan helped, the squirrel chirping at him and keeping her paws resting on the line he was working on. He was actually starting to feel pretty confident in the process—that was when the lavender smoke rising from his potion started producing odd… faces that grimaced at him. “What the fuck?” he blurted as he backed up a step or two. A quick glance around the room showed that none of the other students looked bothered. He cautiously stepped back to the cauldron to check which step he was on. Fortunately, now he needed to let it simmer for ten minutes before he did anything new.
“Mmrrrrrr, your potion is excellent, Mr. Walker. The faces indicate the fluid is”—Professor Tanglewood was interrupted by a huge yawn—“absorbing the mana from the vapor burner perfectly, keep up the good work.” Levi saw her head was raised off her desk and she stared blearily at him. This time it was easy to spot the cat ear on either side of her head, though they folded back against her skull as she yawned once again and let out a sound that was quite purr-like in nature. Before he could ask a question her eyes closed and her head sank back down onto the desk in front of her. Now that I look around, it really isn’t hard to tell the person in charge of the school doesn’t show up for years at a time, he thought.
Levi took a moment to look at Zuzan, and the cream-and-white squirrel chirped and chittered a few times before patting the page she was standing on. “Right, right, let’s just focus on not exploding,” he mumbled as he shook his head. Every time he’d started to think he was getting the hang of this world, something new and crazy happened.
He shook his head to clear his mind and followed the last of the instructions in his tome. It ended the instructions with “apply a solid slap to the side of the cauldron.” He stared at it for a moment. Then he shrugged and lifted the ladle to bang it off the side of the iron vessel. The whole concoction flared a brilliant red, the cloud exploded into a neon-blue flame, and then it all receded back into the fluid to leave a strange violet liquid sitting in his cauldron. He turned off the burner as instructed and began to pour it into the glass vials provided. He hadn’t expected there to be so many doses, so he had to go fetch more potion jars. When he returned, he found Professor Tanglewood dipping her pinkie into the mix and then licking it. “Marvelously done, Mr. Walker, you’ve concocted a perfect health brew for beasts. Make sure to remember that. I had you brew these for your animals, if you drink them yourself, you’ll probably experience… unexpected side effects.”
Levi opened his mouth to ask her about it when she walked away. He might have followed to ask further questions, but the student she was walking toward caught fire. She put it out, but Levi took that as a sign she was… busy. His eyes went to Zuzan as he finished bottling the potion and he shrugged. “What do you think, good to have a healing potion for you?” he asked. She crept toward the bottle he was about to cork and sniffed it several times. Zuzan’s black, beady eyes looked up at him, then she stuck her tongue out and squeaked. “It’s medicine, it isn’t supposed to taste good,” he informed her, parroting something his mother had told him.
Zuzan didn’t seem overly impressed with his opinion and she turned her back on him. Levi shrugged and opened two of the pouches on his baldric; the stasis lantern had several pouches designed for potions, with padded slots inside. He slid the fragile glass containers inside and made sure the pouch was fastened securely. Zuzan might not be a fan of the taste, but he was still relieved to have something that could heal her if she got injured. Professor Ramshackle and Nox had both informed him several times that healing was not something to try if he didn’t know what he was doing. Their use of phrases like necrotic mana infections and tumorous vapor growths was a marvelous way of helping him decide not to experiment.
As Potions came to an end, Levi cleaned up his station and put the ingredients back in the proper bottles. He was careful to return his instruction book to his satchel. Tawny’s warning had made him a bit paranoid, and he realized that messing with the instructions in a potion’s book was a good way to get him to hurt himself without a clear suspect. He didn’t need to be set on fire by mixing the wrong ingredients to know he had to take precautions. Once he was out in the hall, he felt a tingle wash over his emblem. He frowned as he checked the magical raven tattoo. Combat Incantations, Wolf House training square, read the missive. The idea of his first tutoring session in combat magic caused him to grin. “That must mean Nox is back!” he told Zuzan. “Let’s get to class.”
The sylvan squirrel chittered as she jumped to the top of his head and clasped his blue hair in her paws; she hung on as he started jogging down the halls to make his way to the new class. He was glad that a few months of wandering had given him a basic idea of how to navigate the place. The Academy was huge, so it was all too easy to end up in the wrong spot. Zuzan chirped her own opinions as he went along, trying to steer him with his hair, and he couldn’t help but laugh. “Stop that, I’m not a chef and we’re not making food. Hopefully we’re going to blow some shit up,” he remarked, and she squeaked in confusion.
Levi reached up and scratched Flix on the back of her head. He hoped she was healthy; she seemed to be sleeping more and he wasn’t sure why. The little dragonet was a riddle he still hadn’t unraveled, but he loved her already and didn’t want to see her get sick. He made up his mind to go back to the library after this class ended. He needed to complete his research and see if he could find a better guide on dragonets, just to make sure everything was fine.
The charcoal-gray trim in the wing that held Wolf House was soothing. Levi adjusted his glasses with a middle finger. He felt like it was easier to see when the lanterns were dim. He was starting to suspect his vision was better suited to darker environments. Either way, he found the darker curtains pleasant, and since there was less of an ache in his eyes, it was easy to spot the door that led to his training area. Why the hell would they hide the door behind a painting, are they trying to keep the class a secret? he thought. Thoughts on the stupidity of the door design aside, he was eager to see Nox again. He felt like she had been gone for weeks, even though it hadn’t been that long.
Nox was waiting for him up the stairs in the classroom itself. The walls were made of the dark-brown stone that marked older segments of the building. The room was probably fifty feet to a side and thirty high, but all of his attention went to the beautiful elf standing before him. She had her hands clasped behind her back, one foot in front of the other, her hip out to the side, and her lavender eyes looked huge as she nibbled on her bottom lip. Levi watched her shift as he entered the room, and he caught a gleam of mischief in her eyes—then the door slammed shut behind him with a boom.
“First lesson of Combat Incantations is always be ready for an ambush,” Nox purred, then she pulled out a hand and a ball of flames appeared over her palm. Levi blinked as his jaw dropped open. He had a brief moment to raise his cane, then she threw the fireball.
