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Nine in the morning, and the hallways of the Faculty of History And Language were completely empty. No students laughing off in the distance, no groups of teenagers roaming the campus to find the one cafeteria without a line, not even teachers walking at a hurried pace to be able to meet their overly tight schedules. Only the light filtering through the huge, ancient, eternally filthy windows, and the humming of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling.
It was the first week of the official “Vacation Time”, and the only idiots still hanging around in the campus of the prestigious Whelan University were those bound by contract, or the “supplicants” who now clung to their right to study with tooth and nail, as the cruel reality of college life was about to fall on their heads like a lead hammer.
In college, you either excel, or you pay. And if you can’t do neither, Whelan University was happy to release you of any duties and kindly kick you to the streets, without a goodbye kiss or a moment of hesitation. “Good Bye and Good Luck working in Grubbiemart!”, said the cold concrete building, as your dreams of an education crumbled to dust.
This morning’s chopping block was Auditorium #2, for “Restoration II”. Rows upon rows of black and white chairs were divided in three columns, giving a little distance to the teacher’s desk and the wide whiteboard beside it. This was one of the few universities that accepted humans, trolls AND carapacians as students, and the political juggling act required to achieve that, summed to the constant struggle of keeping racial sensitivities in mind at all times, would be enough to fill a book of its own.
It would be, also, completely irrelevant to this story, so it will be skipped. Just know that the chair colours had been changed at least five times to avoid heated discussions about the so unpopular hemospectrum and the alleged use of blood as paint.
The room itself was almost empty: twelve alumni were waiting on the front row, each clinging to their own little composition and trying to keep as far away from the others as possible. Scattered in the upper rows of seats there were some friends and family, waiting to give them support, congratulations, or to carry the remains of their dearly beloved after The Judges had given their ultimatum.
And one of those unfortunate, sad bastards, was Miss Megido.
She HAD thought of getting herself to look a bit more fancy, maybe trying to tame that beast she called hair, or wearing an elegant suit to at LEAST get some advantage with the stuck up Jury. But after posing in her best suit to a lethargic honeyblood and getting called “a bizarro version of Troll Sarah Palim”, Miss Megido dropped all pretenses and decided to simply wear that one old t-shirt with her sign, and a plain long skirt.
She had to use most of her remaining preptime cleaning yellow off her fingernails anyways.
— “Alright then. Miss Mithao.”
There was a moment of silence, before the chosen first sacrifice stood from her seat, slowly approaching the scenario with a brown bag on her shoulders, and pulling a cart that carried her project: a huge clay amphora with exquisite black paintings on its side, depicting scenes of humans and trolls playing a game of catch.
Miss Megido whispered a simple “Good Luck!” as her classmate passed by. The girl smiled in return, her lips now a squiggly, shivering line. The nerves were going to make her explode soon, that was for sure.
— “You have five minutes to set up your presentation and, from there, fifty minutes. Each extra minute you take will deduct a point from your final grade, understood?”
— “Y-Yes, yes! Immediately.”—Poor, sweet Mithao. She was on the verge of peeing herself right there, running off to connect her laptop to the projector, and probably whispering a few prayers.— “Thank you. It will just take a moment to set up, don’t worry. I just gotta get the powerpoint, and, uh… It’s just a slow computer I assure you, please be pat--”
— “The clock is ticking, Miss Mithao.”
At first, that yellowblood was showing some promise. The audience was slowly warming up, some of them even smiling, as the girl started with her presentation by stating the very beginning of written history. She had some dominion over prose and pace, the explanation of such simple things like the arrival of the first troll ancestors to Earth and their development in tandem with the local human cavemen was easy to follow, and even enjoyable despite being something that everyone with two brain cells knew and understood.
But managing to speak up had never been the issue on this butchery of a presentation. No, that was not even the scary part.
— “[...] And it was in this sociopolitical climate that the first alliance between the Troll Tribes and the human cities of Greece came to be. A beautiful exchange of ideas an--”
— “OK STOP! Stop. Stop, woman!!”
One of the three figures sitting on the teacher’s desk stood right up, so fast the wrinkles on her white, gastly face seemed to bounce softly on her cheekbones. A skeletal hand gently pinched the soggy skin between her hoary eyebrows, as she took a sharp breath in.
— “Just… please, explain to us, in less than a hundred words, why aaaaall this human biblical introduction of yours is relevant to your case.”
— “W-Well of course it is relevant!” —Mithao stammered for a moment, but she tried to regain her momentum.— “I have to provide some historical context to who were the people behind t--”
— “You are being quite liberal with the use of your hundred words, sweetie.”
The Jury, now THAT was the terrifying part. All three of them were sitting on their own five foot tall throne, and staring down to their prey in a mixture of disdain and bloodthirst. The reason behind this shameless abuse of power being allowed was mere tradition, with connections to the decaying subjugglator culture and strange accords with the carpentry guilds of the Earth in the 17th Century.
The Generic Archaeologist was the one guy among the alumni that would speak about that, actually! But again, being irrelevant to this story, we shall just ignore the happy little black carapacian and his certainly impressively detailed chair diorama. Instead, we will focus on the three looming figures behind the desk.
Mrs. Sánchez, the English teacher, was the one woman who prided herself on maintaining her position as the single female on the Jury, while also having a habit of hushering all possible competition away. “Sorority” and “Patience” were alien concepts to her, and they had been since she started working as a teacher over fifty years ago. Her face had paled to such an extent in her service that people say you can actually see her veins throbbing under her cheeks if you stare long enough.
Mr. Vosnak, one of the many Ancient Anatomy teachers, and by far the scariest lowblood anyone has ever seen, was infamous for his tendency to send other lowbloods to the worst assignments possible. From uncomfortable encounters with war veterans, to conversations with openly racist humans. People said he perforated his horns each time he made a student leave their career, and by now those old, curved cornets were more akin to swiss cheese than actual horns.
And finally, Mr. Johnson. A young tanned man with a calm smile and a distracted look on his eyes. He was the youngest addition to the Jury ever, and with good reason! People say that smile never abandoned his face, not even when telling his students to go straight to hell. He was, by far, the worst of them all. The one who truly enjoyed his position of power. Maybe that was what made the other two accept him this fast.
Miss Megido could feel them staring at her from time to time, their eyes sweeping from one side of that front row to the other, while not really paying attention to the young highblood that was currently expositing her work about an ancient vase she decided to restore, and re-paint, herself. She was not a priority anymore, the Jury had probably decided to either boot her, or give her the BARE MINIMUM to pass. That’s just how it worked.
No matter the effort or the beautiful result, the Jury’s standards were impossible to meet, and now they were looking for a new victim.
Miss Megido sighed, closing her eyes for a moment while her hands squeezed her last hope: a messenger bag full of pieces of paper and pictures of books. How did it come to this? Why did she allow this to happen? For a moment, in the middle of that past year, she felt like everything was perfectly under her control! Each little test, each pesky assignment, each time she had to get on her knees and humiliate herself to get a tiny job with the teacher she wanted, just to accumulate those precious extra credits and contacts.
—“P-Please, I need a little more time.” —Cornered, Mithao was now clinging to a student’s last resort: begging for mercy. Her hands squeezed the multiple notes she thought would save her in case of a rapid fire interrogation.— “I need to accumulate some credits if I want to make my practice in Troll Spain, and--”
—“We have no interest in your extra credits.” -Vosnak snorted, looking down his nose on the already panicking lowblood.- “If you are struggling to keep your credits in order, maybe you do not really deserve to be within these halls in the first place.”
Oh, those extra credits were made by the devil himself. A real addiction they were, even worse than sopor and meth when one knew the amount of doors they could open for you. They twisted the minds of troll and human alike, many went absolutely insane trying to gather as many as they believed themselves to be capable of handling.
But the worst part of it all was that this wasn’t even a terribly important class. Who really cared so much for Restoration II!? An optional class meant for those who only had a few free hours to spend, or wanted to have a “safety net” for any emergencies.
The problem here was that she could not really take the satisfaction of just letting this class go and taking it again next year. Oh no. There was a spider in that very room, and she was listening to it all. She LAUGHED at it all too, scorn just dripping from her one eye.
Miss Megido turned around for a moment, her eyes scanning the few people sitting behind her, looking for THAT BITCH. Some people would not just get up and watch others fail just for fun, but Serket would. Absolutely. At least for her she would, and that was clear.
With time she had learned to ignore her. To just, well, tolerate the presence of that woman in her inner circle, sometimes even cracking a few jokes here and there. But there was always this animosity, this… rivalry, if you wanted to call it that. Something that danced in the limit with the caliginous.
Whenever she failed at something, there she was to smirk about it. And if Miss Megido failed at this class, jegus, she would never hear the end of it.
NEVER.
Megido could not find the annoying lady within the public but she KNEW, she just KNEW Serket was watching. And in a way, this only pumped her more. Megido had a reason to see this through.
— “Next. Miss Aradia Megido.”—Mr. Johnson spoke up without really minding the tearing up lowblood, or even his coworkers. That was the way he worked.—“If you would be so kind to set us free from Miss Linora’s ramblings? That would be GREAT”
“Well… here goes nothing”, thought the ram horned lady as she took a deep breath, and left her seat. Before she approached the scenario, Miss Megido took one last look at her bag. The restored book was still there, after so many nights struggling to understand ramblings, incoherent narrators and a few inconsistencies in the teal stained pages… “The Seer’s Testimony” was still there, now perfectly translated.
Her one ticket out of this room and to some very well deserved vacations.
“We are together in this, Madame Pyrope…”, mumbled Aradia as she cracked the bones on her neck, set the old slideshow projector without saying a word to her teachers, and then pulled out the complete restoration work.
The leather cover, and each separated page behind it, were all covered on their own film of plastic to avoid the materials deteriorating much more. She presented the book to the teachers without much parsimony, climbing on the auxiliary flight of stairs to leave it on their desk.
And then, carrying the translated version of plane white office paper on her hands, she confronted the public.
“Let’s raise some hell.”