Work Text:
So, being a pumpkin kinda sucks. It could definitely be worse! Mirta’s actually pretty flattered that it isn’t worse – the upperclassmen that had cursed her had intended her to keep her mind, and they’d done a pretty good job on that! She’s aware, and can think, and she spends those first few days humming her favorite songs to herself and daydreaming about what kind of cool stuff Lucy’s doing to enact revenge.
She’s never had anybody get revenge on her behalf before. And, sure, she knows she wasn’t the real target of the attack, but Lucy’s her friend, even if Mirta’s not supposed to use that word, and Lucy would flip shit even if the upperclassmen hadn’t been gunning for a power-play. She hopes its vicious.
And anyway the curse brings so much cool stuff, Mirta can hardly believe it!
Alfea actually sucks which is a little bit of a disappointment, but Lucy gave her to a gorgeous fairy and her magic feels very nice, and Mirta even makes friends with her, when the fairy finally manages to unravel enough of the curse to worm her own power on through. Like, actual friends. Flora has no problem letting her use the word and everything!
And she’ll teach her, too.
Mirta’s not totally sure if she wants to be a fairy, but she’ll make a better witch-pretending-to-be-a-fairy than she has a fairy-pretending-to-be-a-witch. Fairies can be cruel if they want to; witches cannot be friendly. Her new fairy friend, Flora, is both, which Mirta thinks she likes best. She’s got such a crush it’s not even funny but even Lucy wouldn’t make fun of her for it, given how cow-eyed Icy gets whenever one of Flora’s friends, the Earth girl Bloom, gets near.
Mirta wishes she had her voice just so she could make fun of Icy for it. Icy and her sisters don’t respond well to teasing that is bright and bubbly, and Mirta personally thinks it’s hilarious. Another approach would’ve lost her her tongue entirely; this way she gets to poke at them and not die. It’s the best of both worlds.
Which – it doesn’t really bring her to now, but it does explain now.
Flora’s great. Mirta’s never met a Linphean fairy before – Mirta’s a whole other kind of backwater than Lucy but still just as isolated – but she hopes all of them are like Flora. Once they’d figured out how to communicate, and Flora had realized Mirta was conscious and capable of hearing and seeing the world around her, she’d asked if Mirta wanted to spy.
Spy. This shit is fantastic. She doesn’t get to do anything even remotely near as cool at Cloud Tower.
So; a thick tendril of ivy lifts Mirta out of Flora’s arms and swings her up, up, up in the air until it sets her down delicately on the very corner of a window ledge. The Alfea headmistress’ office isn’t located at the top of a tower or the highest point of the school, instead set in the middle with an imposing view of the courtyard sprawled out beneath it. Classrooms and laboratories and dormitories are stacked above and below and to the sides of it.
Faragonda’s a stupid motherfucker though. Instead of taking advantage of all that cover, she ignores it. Maybe it’s supposed to be a disguise, or some kind of cover? Make her seem close to the faculty and student body? But it just means there’s about a thousand access points to her office through walls and doors and ceilings and floors.
Windows are just the easiest. And Faragonda’s left the damn things open.
See – the curse? Mirta’s supposed to be perceived as a regular pumpkin. Which means not a single fucking sole pays attention to her. If Lucy hadn’t seen it happen, if Flora’s affinity wasn’t nature itself –
“ – coming in person. I know you must be busy.”
Oh, she’s got guests. A guest. Mirta focuses – she can twitch her fronds and flail her leaf but actually moving the pumpkin part of her is a no-go – and…
It’s the Red Fountain headmaster. The tiny little old wizard dude. Why a wizard was running a school for specialists, one that didn’t even teach basic magic courses…
He’s smiling warmly at the fairy. She’s not sitting at her desk. He’s a friend, the desk is meant to impose. They’re seated around a small coffee table ladened with a tea service just off to the side of it. They are frighteningly close to the window and, by extension, Mirta. That’s a good thing though. Means she can hear better.
“Not as busy as you fear, Faragonda. The boys know to behave themselves. Codatorta has been putting them through their paces.”
“Is your nephew doing alright? He must be devastated.”
“He’d been neglecting his studies. I think the incident has reminded him of their importance.” The wizard sounds less concerned for his nephew’s wellbeing and more pleased at the result. Not that anything really bad happened, but technically the Trix had still attacked him, and every witch in Cloud Tower knows the wizard’s nephew’s a sheltered little idiot.
Faragonda shares a smile with the wizard.
“I’m glad to hear that. I think the incident has put Bloom off her own studies.”
“There’s no need to rush. If a slow approach will work best, we may as well embrace it.”
“I think so too. She knows we only acted to protect her, but I still fear her trust in us has been damaged. She doesn’t seem to grasp the true danger she was in. I suspect she’s not yet accepted who she is.”
“Remarkable. To think, all this time, the Flame was on Earth…”
“A stroke of genius. I can think of no better place for it.”
Both head…persons? Headpeople. Mirta’s not sure what the gender-neutral term for Headmistress is, but…Anyway. Both of them sound – admiring.
“How are the other girls handling it?”
“They aren’t pleased with the grounding, but the extenuating circumstances of their disappearance is no excuse to ignore Alfea’s regulations. Ideally I’d like to extend it until Griffin is…settled. I’m a little concerned over the girls’ friendship – Princess Stella has been socializing with everyone but the other girls, you know. I think they’ve been fighting.”
“Long experience has taught me, at least, to stay out of the students’ squabbles. They’re young. They’ll sort it out.”
“Oh, I agree. I suspect their close quarters isn’t helping. Once they’re free to roam the campus, they should settle right down.”
Mirta’s in absolute awe of their stupidity. Seriously. But –
Griffin.
She wishes she was. Y’know. Capable. It’d have been terrible for the whole conspiracy plan or whatever, but she’d be totally able to make the bodies disappear!
Their conversation meanders around a self-congratulatory jerk-off over possession of the earth fairy, and then rolls right back into Cloud Tower’s Headmistress. This was why Mirta had agreed to spy.
Once-Upon-A-Time, Cloud Tower and Red Fountain and Alfea had run joint-ops. Cloud Tower still had records of the exercises, of the teams formed between witch and fairy and specialist alike. Mirta guesses it was the fall of Domino that changed things, the rise of the Company and their stupid conspiracy bullshit.
But – keeping Cloud Tower around? When the Company had neatly pivoted public opinion against witches and built up that animosity for centuries?
Headmistress Griffin wasn’t allowed to go out and collect baby witches. She’d changed Cloud Tower’s acceptance policies – anyone who made it would be accepted as a student. But untrained baby witches, especially those without a family to back them up –
Most of them died. Most of them died horribly. At the hands of those they loved and trusted.
Neither Alfea nor Red Fountain lifted so much as a finger to stop it. They agreed with public sentiment. That witches were inherently evil, unredeemable.
Mirta wants to know why they kept Cloud Tower around in the first place. The building itself, sure – she’s fairly certain the Tower’s indestructible. But why continue allowing for witches to be educated, even if they were doctoring and censoring their learning? Almost all graduates left Magix to find a hole-in-the-wall sanctuary elsewhere in the magic dimension. They didn’t make names for themselves, not publicly. They didn’t start shit. There was nothing to back up those stereotypes and prejudices.
Mirta knows that witches have to be serving some kind of purpose. She just can’t figure out what it is. And, sure, it’s not a priority what with everything else going on but –
It’s the most important part for her. So.
They don’t say it. Not aloud, anyway. What they do talk about is Headmistress Griffin.
“ – incapable of keeping a few girls in line, she shouldn’t have been put in charge at all!”
“We allowed her to take control of Cloud Tower knowing her affinity would keep her in line, and from her, her students. I would rather consider how many other breaches we would’ve had to deal with, had we allowed a different witch to ascend to Headmistress.” Faragonda’s tone is reasonable and oddly pointed. The wizard huffs.
“Perhaps. I know she was the most promising prospect at the time – and we haven’t seen a potential replacement yet. I’m just – frustrated. We nearly lost the Dragon Flame thanks to her carelessness, and my boys have been misbehaving more than usual thanks to those witches.”
“Well, they’re not going to be a problem anymore.”
“Thank magic for that. Thank you for letting me vent, my dear. I so rarely get the chance at Red Fountain.”
“I thought Codatorta had been inducted?”
“Yes, but he’s so busy with the students – he prefers a hands-on approach, you know. Frees up my time to handle more pressing matters, for which I am always grateful, but I don’t like to monopolize his time if I can avoid it.”
“I have to say, I’m frankly jealous you have such an able assistant! I hope to hire a few new professors next year, perhaps I’ll find a candidate amongst them.”
“I can start putting together a short list for you, if you’d like.”
The conversation meanders into bullshit, and Mirta reaches out for the tendril of magic connecting her to Flora and tugs gently. Slowly, subtly, carefully, vines snake up and over the lip of the window and hoist her up. She keeps her senses trained on the wizard and the fairy, but neither notice the slight movement as Flora lowers her down.
Headmistress Griffin’s affinity. They’d thought it – what, controlled her? Shaped her? Would have bound her tighter than anything they ever could have done to her?
It’s stupid. It’s so stupid, so antithetical to anything any witch or wizard or fairy could say that –
There’s got to be a reason for their instance on it. They’d talked less about Headmistress Griffin and more about her affinity.
‘S okay, though. Mirta has the time. And the abilities.
Those dipshit upperclassmen had thought to kill her with the transformation. Instead, they might’ve just handed her the keys to figuring out this whole mess.
And when she gets her body back – well.
Those assholes who’ve mistreated her Headmistress are gonna regret every word out of their mouths.
She’ll make sure of it.