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It had been an accident, really, just a badly placed flaming arrow when the Summer Society had stormed the Alchemy Club’s home base in search of one of the sisters that had gone missing last week. It was supposed to be a quick in and out, nothing disturbed except the few tables they would have needed to flip to make sure there were no secret passages hiding somewhere underneath. But one of the new pledges, a young girl who had only joined the semester before, had held her arrows upwards, where the tampon they had tied onto the ends caught the flame from a torch.
The tampon had gone up in seconds and she had freaked out, throwing the arrow away from herself instead of just stamping out the fire with her shoes, like she’d been taught to do in battle.
Thrown it right into a pile of hay-why the Alchemy Club was keeping so much of the stuff in their base, none of them knew, but it caught quick, forcing the others out of the house before the fire spread too far and trapped them.
It was the same fire that, with no resources to put it out and only just enough man power to keep the houses around it from going up in smoke, was just now reaching the third floor, where the Club had decided to store their “dangerous” stuff.
When the little POPs, more than loud enough to be heard over the inferno that was the house itself, started going off, most of the students were smart enough to turn tail and run, their own hides more important than the extra, now mostly abandoned houses on the edge of campus. The rest fled when the whistling started, giving them just enough time to get clear.
To say the house exploded would have been an understatement, a disgrace to the performance the gun power and colored dyes the Alchemy Club had stored up there, that had mixed and melted together to create a spectacle that rivaled the light of Lophi, the anglerfish god so many of their classmates had taken to worshiping in their free time. Pinks and greens, yellows and purples, blues and reds and oranges streaked the midafternoon sky, painting the clouds a rainbow of color and flames as the air began to burn.
“And that, gentle viewers,” Laura said slowly, her voice muffled by the gas mask LaFontaine had found in the basement, “is why you don’t set the Alchemy Club’s house on fire. Our team scientist has predicted the clouds will stop burning by tomorrow morning, but until then, I would suggest carrying an umbrella with you at all times. Preferably one of the metal ones with the rubber handles being distributed by the Blacksmith Club, so the flaming balls of fire can’t kill you. On the bright side, our harpy problem seems to have eased off, as has the downpour of spiders. But please be warned that the pieces of cooked bird you can find lying on the ground are, in fact, not chicken…”
The fireworks had been pretty, but when even the sky had begun to burn, Mattie had stepped back and let Laura do her thing. She was too old for this shit, and when she’d asked herself what she could put up with today?
This hadn’t been on the list.