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His name is Kurt.
The boy who is always soaked to the bone. While he didn’t give me his name himself, his older brother, Lucas [the one who wears the welding gloves everywhere] happily gave it to me.
Kurt has no friends by choice. Anyone who approaches him is immediately met with a paragraph long verbal lashing.
He’s always wet, as if he had just crawled out from the ocean. It is not sweat either; the custodian Principal Lee Anders has assigned to him claims that it is actually lake water. How she acquired this information, though, she wasn’t keen on giving.
Everyone had to take shelter in their nearest building today as a massive swarm of demons flew over the school.
They choked the windows and covered the walls, and the buildings creaked when the motes squeezed.
Misery was known for its high Angel-Demon population, but this was an insane number even for the town.
The demons struggled to get in for a few minutes before they started to disperse. When the demons left some openings the braver kids decided to go and check what was happening.
According to them, Lee Anders was walking around the grounds with no protection at all, screaming at the demons through a megaphone. "Disperse! Disperse! Disperse!" Wandered into the classrooms as more and more demons retreared.
The whole ordeal was 10 minutes long, and class resumed shortly after.
"You need my WHAT?" I had to take a step back. What would you do, Readers, if your principal asked for your blood?
Said principal casually drew a knife from his belt. "Your blood. The creature in there wants an offering."
"I would hope you knew better than to call a spirit a creature, Mr. Lee Anders." Prudence took the knife away from him. "That looked really threatening...."
"I'm a principal."
"Did you say a spirit?" I interjected. "Spirits haven't been seen in centuries..."
"Just because they aren't seen doesn't mean they aren't there. You're made of cells, no? Atoms? Quarks and gluons?"
"I-I guess....but--"
"Besides, magic can't hurt them."
"Nor should it." Prudence gave the principal a look. "The spirit should be appeased, not attacked. Which is why we need your blood."
"Why my blood?" I pulled my sweater sleeves down a bit. "Doesn't all blood work in spellwork?"
"This isn't spellwork, it's an offering. And your blood is....special."
".....No?"
"Yes. Your blood is....unchanged. It's what we call 'Unmisted'."
"....I've never heard of that."
"Its a local phenomena. But it just means that, for now, your blood is special. And sadly, that means you're a....delicacy."
I shuddered at the thought. "I--"
Principal Lee Anders stopped me. "This is our only option son. We need your blood."
I resisted for a bit, but eventually I gave in. None of Principal Lee Anders' spells worked, and Prudence's meditations gave her the same answer. My blood was the only way this would end.
Prudence carefully pushed my sleeve up and drew her knife. I clenched my eyes shut and turned away, and winced. Luckily she made the....incision on my arm instead of my palm. Principal Lee Anders quickly bandaged the wound while Prudence smeared my blood on her hands. I felt woozy; it was too much for me. The cut, the...ritual....
I tried not to throw up.
Prudence reached for the vines with both hands, and before she even touched them the vines fell away. Prudence glanced back at Principal Lee Anders, then tried to enter Building 17. However, she stopped short. "Ail'sur'ia..." She cursed. Prudence then gave me an apologetic look. "It wants you to come with."
Dear Readers, at that moment I spoke my mind.
"Are you guys going to feed me to a spirit?"
"Wha--no!" Prudence rushed to deny.
"No harm will come to you, Mr. Page." Principal Lee Anders came up and put a hand on my shoulder, and a chill went down my spine. "I swear it."
Our magician of a principal wrapped a silver thread around my wrist and Prudence's, then used golden confetti mixed with sand to draw a circle that hovered in the air around him. "Stay behind me at all times."
When we entered Building 17, the vines came up again, trapping us inside. The interior was destroyed; the walls were split by tree roots, and flowers grew at random intervals. Moss covered everything, and small glowing motes were the only source of light. It was warm, and the air felt wet.
I looked ahead at Principal Lee Anders, and he was smiling. "Let's do this."
[End of Part 2]
No one could enter Building 17 today. While it wasn't exactly because of the overgrown vines wrapping around the entire property, growing denser and knotting at any entrance, especially the door, they certainly helped.
My peers weren't exactly....affected by the blockage. They saw it as an opportunity to mess with their phones and have a break; two couples even decided to have a picnic right then and there.
Meiriam, of course, went to grab her father, Principal Lee Anders, who proceeded to do a particularly....intricate ritual that required dancing around the building, swallowing a stick of butter whole, and stabbing a statue made of some kind of melon with a firepoker.
The vines choking Building 17 blackened, but did not wilt. Apparently, this was not the intended effect, since Principal Lee Anders frowned, crossed his arms, and said "The woods rot serves to the feeding of his growth." Whatever that meant.
No one except me seemed to pay much attention to Principal Lee Anders as he tried to free the building several different ways, which includes: using wichfyre to burn the vines away [it didn't], talking to the vines using the language of flowers [from what I gathered, the flowers grown by the vines in response essentially said "fuck off"], and simply hacking at the vines with the firepoker.
There were ten minutes left in class when Principal Lee Anders decided to call for outside help.
I didn't expect my neighbor Prudence to show up, trying to ride her bike in her vestments; as an Oracle, the priestesses who followed the Goddess Aliurian, her garments were highly impractical. The vestments were designed to show off as much skin as possible, to display the jagged tree like scars that all Oracles had to bear.
Prudence approached the vines and pressed her palm against them, letting her eyes drift close. She stayed like that while my peers began to wander off, some moving on to their next class, while some outright skipped, using Principal Lee Anders attention to the blockage to leave without his notice. My next class still im Building 17, so I had to stay while the next group of students approached and were faced with the same problem as the previous period.
Prudence pulled away from the vines with a worried look, and pulled Principal Lee Anders aside to talk. They would occasionally point at me, which just made me hug myself and try to seem smaller than I already was. If they thought I had something to do with this catastrophe, they would be sorely mistaken; I still wasn't allowed to do the practical labs in any of the thaumaturgy classes.
Principal Lee Anders approached me with his hands behind his back, and Prudence followed, fidgeting with her mossy hair. They pulled me to the side, away from the other students.
"Story," Prudence began, wringing her hands. "We, uhm..."
Principal Lee Anders interjected. "We need your help, son."
"With....the vines?" They nodded. "I don't see how I can help..."
"It's not you, per se..."
"Your blood, Mr. Page. We need your blood."
[End of Part 1]
The Net was shut down today, which was inconvenient since everyone had some kind of project due.
So a girl with pink hair took the router and drew a circle around it with black sand (she carries a bag of it with her at all times....apparently). She whispered something to it, spat on it, then plugged it back in. Everyone had wifi immediately after.
She still won't tell me what she did.
As you remember, Colem Arth died from a cougar attack.
Well today, he walked into class, perfectly fine. Now, I know what I saw. There's no way he could be alive, walking, or even in...one piece.
Yet, there he was. Laughing and joking, as usual.
When 5th period came around, a piece of rebar came through the window and stabbed him through the heart, killing him instantly. While my classmates were shocked, they treated the incident mostly as a nuisance, rather than the tragic event I saw it as. They mostly tried to figure out how Colem managed to "pull that off".
I was sent to the guidance counselor after the incident. Despite being a literal anteater in glasses, Mr. Lingua was good at his job.
The cougar came back today. This time, it had stayed past sunset, so everyone was forced to spend the night. Luckily, the staff stocks sleeping bags for this very scenario.
I was given a good glimpse at why no one is called to deal with the cougar whenever it shows up. One student, I believe his name is Colem Arth, came to MSAA late, and was immediately attacked by the lion.
I will spare the gory details, but let it be known that my hands shook as I typed this, and I didn't get any sleep that night.
Several dogs tried to attack the cougar, only to meet the same fate as Colem Arth. In fact, the only thing that went out into the courtyard and survived was Principal Lee Anders, who decided to wear a jester hat today. He was too far for me to see what he was doing, but he came straight to the cougar and touched it. When he left, he held 8 bloody cougar paws. Where he got them from, I don't know. The cougar still had all its paws, since it walked away fine come sunrise.
The school gave us the next three days off due to the incident.
Let me tell you about where I live.
According to town history, Misery used to be a collection of four hamlet sized colonies, each founded by one of the four sons of Finely Misery. Because of the loss of Finely's will, the four hamlets essentially ostracized each other for a few decades until the arrival of something records call "Winter".
There is no description of what Winter actually is; all that is said is that Winter was a devastating blow to resources, and forced the four colonies to band together for survival. When Winter ended, the four colonies remained banded, and thus Misery was born.
Despite the town's supposed unity, remnants of its time as hamlets is still prevalent to this day. Four wards, or neighborhoods, each named after the four brothers, make up Misery. These wards are scattered and an organized mess, even within themselves. Even with the roads and community centers placed in between each ward, entering another neighborhood was basically like entering another city.
The only truly neutral place between each ward was the Misery School for All Ages. Equidistant from every ward, it was the center of town, and every child in Misery was enrolled there, from pre-K to Senior year. Almost like a reflection of the town, the school was actually made up of several buildings of various sizes, thrown almost haphazardly on it's hill without any rhyme or reason. The only consistent building was administration, a building the size of a trailer at the bottom of the hill. Everything else is thrown to the wind--you can have science in building J class 7 one day, and the next J7 is reserved for advanced algebra, or theoretical transmuatiom, or lenormand.
And that's just the mundane oddities. One rule of the school is that you can't look in the space in the doorframe; Principal Lee Anders even employs hall monitor like figures to prevent students from doing specifically that, who are recognizeable by the red armbands that they wear. Of note: I -did- witness a custodian slip some raw meat into the space though.
A daily event at MSAA is "Puma Time". Every building goes on lock down while a mountain lion, from Gods know where, prowls around the campus. This can last anywhere between half an hour to an entire day; in the event of the latter, guardians are called and the situation is explained. Either way, classes can't continue until the puma leaves of its own volition.
Beyond the events, such as the sudden screaming from the next room over that was suddenly cut short, and the third grader who levitated four feet off the ground for an hour [she's okay; she was unconscious the whole time], the faculty and students only add to the strangeness. One boy who shares two classes with me and refuses to give his name is always drenched--always. Hours will pass, and yet he will always appear to have just crawled out from the ocean. A custodian has to follow him around for all the puddles he leaves. Another boy, who appears to be the drenched boy's brother, always wears welding gloves. He wore them even when he helped the pre-K kids with finger painting.
A girl who had slit pupils and a tail [a real tail--she says she has Irre's Disorder] had showed me around campus. She waved to a girl who had deer eyes [the girl constantly smiles and spoke in riddles] and even introduced me to her brother, a boy who had turquoise hair and a slab of lapis lazuli in place of a tongue. Their names are Meiriam and Constant Lee Anders; they were the principal's kids.
Principal Lee Anders was a magician--through sleight of hand, he pulled a coin out of my ear. Then he turned the coin into glass, shattered it, and melted the shards into a flower shape using only his mind. Principal Lee Anders kept half mentioning events that hadn't happened [amongst which involved the time that Puma Time would happen that day, his daughter tripping over a loose floorboard, and a teacher by the name of Mr. Slins having his desk spontaneously combust. The last of these had no obvious causation, but it happened anyways] and claimed that the moon was his child. I was speechless when I left his office. More so when those events actually happened.