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Twins were unlucky, which was why Louis de Sade’s relationship with his family hovered somewhere in between awful and nonexistent; twins were unlucky, which was why his sister Dominique did not know he existed; twins were unlucky, which was why Louis existed at all, because his very existence was a curse.
Grandfather had told him how they’d decided he was a curse, long ago in the moments after his birth. It had been himself and Dominique then, unnamed, squalling things, and their father had decided that he’d rather another daughter than another son. It had been a simple whim, nothing more; there was no cause for the decision other than the man’s feelings at the time. Had the smallest of details been different, Louis might have been the chosen twin instead, and Dominique the source of bad luck—and for that, Louis owed the man his life.
Dominique didn’t know he existed. Dominique didn’t know she was a twin. Dominique’s life was a happy one, a blessed one, and even if Louis couldn’t quite remember where he had seen her smile, bright and innocent as the stars at night, he knew that he valued it, knew that her innocence and her happiness were more precious to him than anything else in the world, even if they could never meet. They had been together when they were born; that was enough for Louis. Their lives had begun entangled with each other, grown intertwined in the same womb. He could not ask for more.
So of course he did whatever the family asked of him. Of course he never thought to disobey. He was their curse; he brought misfortune to all that he touched. Of course he spread it to his family’s enemies whenever he was commanded thus. That was the only way he had of protecting his sister, of ensuring her happiness in life. Twins were, after all, unlucky, and anything else he tried would only bring her misfortune.
Sometimes, Louis dreamed. In his dreams, he lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and wandered the halls alone. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and Grandfather brought home another child to toy with. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he had a friend, and he was not alone. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he carved stakes for his friend to kill him with. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and his sister came to visit. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he had a sister and he had a friend. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he tricked and tested them, learned for certain that they would miss him when he died, watched them search for him and cry for him and beg him to be found. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he stayed hidden for longer and longer. He lived in Grandfather’s mansion, and he was not found.
Louis de Sade was the de Sade family’s weapon, and that was the only reason why he carried the family name. He was the de Sade family’s weapon, and he had just been given another target to aim at: the only cleric of the evillest of the gods, Vanitas of the Blue Moon.
“I’m just saying that the inherent concept of an adventurers’ academy is classist and the world’s easiest way of exerting control over the next—and really every—generation of adventurers,” said the only cleric of the Blue Moon, perched on top of the lunch counter and flipping idly the book he kept chained to his waist at all times. “I don’t know why you guys are all up in arms about it.”
“Mr. Suzuki,” said the lunch lady, “this is the fifth time I am asking you to get off the counter. You’re contaminating the food and getting in the way of the other students’ lunches.”
“You’re trying to silence me because you don’t want these sheep to know the truth!”
“By the Red Moon above,” said his partymember, the wizard Dominique de Sade. “Noé, mon cherie, can you please shut him up?”
“You’re the one who knows Silence,” said Noé, Dominique’s best friend and the paladin of their party.
“I used up all my spell slots against Veronica this morning, unfortunately,” said Dominique. “She had a few things to say about my attendance at Aguefort. You’ll have to be the one to do it—unless, Jeanne, do you want to…?”
Jeanne, their party’s fighter who already bore a grudge against Vanitas, eyed Vanitas as though she were considering it, but then she said, “If he gets another detention from this, we won’t have to deal with him for the rest of lunch.”
“That is true…” Dominique mused. “Choices, choices…”
“Unless we get detention with him,” said Noé. “It seems almost like a trend for our party, Domi.”
“That’s also true.”
The four of them had not chosen each other to team up with like the other students in their school. Instead, they were bound together for a far simpler reason: they’d all gotten detention on their first day, and had missed their chance to form parties with classmates whom they actually liked. Vanitas had forced a kiss on Jeanne; Jeanne had thrown Vanitas through a second story window; Domi had stolen a book out of the library; Noé had broken into the dean’s office and stolen several expensive teabags; Vanitas had broken into the teacher’s lounge and raided the fridge; Vanitas had broken into the dean’s office and hit on the vice-principal; Vanitas had snuck into Owlbear tryouts and heckled the coach.
Nobody liked Vanitas very much, except for Noé, who kind of wanted to put him in a glass jar and study him.
A member of the Owlbear’s team, clearly fed up with Vanitas blocking off the lunch line, stalked forward, shouldering his way through the other three partymembers. His face was obscured by his ballcap and by the black hair that hung past his chin, but the three of them caught a glimpse of furious yellow eyes underneath before he snatched the book out of Vanitas’s hands and tossed it over the counter into a vat of creamed corn; then he yanked Vanitas off the counter and onto the ground; then he stomped on Vanitas’s neck, as if he meant to break it.
“Hey! That’s overkill,” shouted Jeanne, “and if anyone gets to break his neck, it’s me!”
Noé lunged at the Owlbears player, knocking him off of Vanitas and rolling with him across the floor; Domi used Mage Hand to pull Vanitas up by the scruff of his neck.
“Don’t do that again,” she said. “Seriously, what were you thinking?! You’re giving the rest of us a bad look, and you’re holding up lunch for everyone, and now your nasty book has contaminated the nasty creamed corn.”
Vanitas smirked. “Maybe that was my goal,” he said. “The creamed corn does look like it sucks extremely.”
“Ugh.” She dropped the party’s cleric, which didn’t have much of an effect as the Mage Hand could only lift around one pound at a time, and sent the Mage Hand to go fish Vanitas’s nasty book out of the nasty creamed corn. She let the corn drip back into the vat until the book was covered with only the slightest grubby film, and then tossed it back to her party’s cleric. “Here. Clean it yourself, loser.”
“Gross,” said Vanitas.
“Yeah, it is. And you deserve it,” said Jeanne. “Miss Dominique’s really being too kind to you, getting the book out like that.”
“Not really,” said Domi. “I just don’t want to deal with one of us having to go back there and dig it out, that’s all. Can you imagine how much Vanitas would bitch about it? And imagine if you or Noé had to help him get it out. I know Noé would, at least, and then he’d be covered in creamed corn for the rest of the day, on our first day of school. We need to keep some of our dignity, you know?”
Jeanne shuddered, and Domi thought that she’d probably hit the nail on the head when she’d guessed that Jeanne would also help dig through the creamed corn to get Vanitas’s book out. The girls got their lunch without any further delay, and Vanitas sulked behind them and tried and failed to wipe off his book with napkins, and Noé trotted up when they reached the end of the line, sporting a fresh black eye.
“He teleported away,” he said cheerily. “The Owlbears player, I mean. Who was messing with Vanitas. Hey, by the way, is creamed corn supposed to move like that?”
“Shut up,” said Vanitas. “It’s obviously not budging.”
“Oh—no, I meant behind you guys,” said Noé. “It’s, like, raising up out of the barrel—oh, I think it just absorbed the lunch lady!”
“What?!”
All three of his partymembers turned as one to see the corn raising up towards the line of students, just as Noé had said, with the lunch lady leading the charge; within seconds, the rest of the population of the room had scattered and vanished, leaving just four freshmen standing their ground against the lunchlady and a truly ridiculous amount of creamed corn.
“Vanitas,” said Noé, “this is why you should always be polite to the people giving you food.”
“Oh, so this is all my fault now?!”
“Yes!” shouted Jeanne. “This has literally always been your fault, you creep!”
“Ahhh,” sighed Vanitas. “I love you too~!”
Jeanne shoved Vanitas directly into the creamed corn.
Not ten minutes later, Domi found herself standing in the center of the lunchroom, creamed corn coating every surface, except for the dented bottom of the ladle she was clutching in her hands, which was covered in the blood and cranial matter of the former lunch lady, her last words still ringing in Domi’s ears. She was still slamming the ladle down on the woman’s broken skull, even though she had long since stopped moving; stopping hitting her would mean that the battle was over, which would mean that she would have to look at the corpses of her friends, scattered around the room. Nobody had helped them against the corn monster and the lunch lady; nobody had cared.
The door to the lunch room opened and the principal and guidance counselor walked in and surveyed the scene before them; Domi let her ladle fall from numb fingers as she stared up at them, a mess of blood and corn and tears.
“They’re dead,” she said, her voice ragged. “They’re all—they’re all dead.”
The principal, the Marquis Machina, stared down at her, face obscured as usual behind his iron mask. Then he took an egg from a briefcase and set it on a table; then he pulled out a shotgun and shot the guidance counselor in the head. Domi stared at him in shock; the principal pressed the tip of the gun underneath his jaw and pulled the trigger. His head exploded; he collapsed to the ground on top of the guidance counselor; all around the lunchroom, the three fallen members of Domi’s party pushed themselves up, gasping and coughing.
“I saw my mom,” said Vanitas.
“I think I went to hell!” said Noé.
“I…I’m fairly certain I just smuggled Marquis Machina into heaven?” said Jeanne.
“Murder-suicide,” Domi said faintly. “The principal just did a murder-suicide.”
“What?!”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but…but something’s going on here,” said Domi. “The lunch lady…her last words were not to trust the faculty. And also that I killed her. And…I know Noé found something in the corn monster…”
“Dark runes,” Noé said. “Vanitas, you’re a cleric. Can you make any of them out?”
Vanitas squinted at the crumpled sheet of paper in Noé’s hand. “Yeah, I think I know what that looks like…” he said.
“Really?” said Jeanne. “What?”
“They’re fugly,” he said. “Also—you know that weirdo Noé jumped? The one who was fucking with the Book of Vanitas?”
The other three nodded.
“He definitely slipped this in there and used Luna’s power to activate it. Whore.”
“So this was—a conspiracy of some sort,” said Jeanne. “The Owlbears player was working together with someone to attack the school…but why? And why did Marquis Machina do—do that to bring us back from the dead?”
Domi thought that if she had been killed, she would not have wanted to go back. She thought that if she knew what spell the principal had cast, she would have used it immediately and without hesitation. After all, dying was less of a fear and more of a wish. If she died, she would see Louis again. If she died and brought Louis back, Noé would be happy.
“Maybe he thought that we could do something about this,” said Noé. “Track down who’s behind it…stop their evil plan. Or something.”
Domi took a deep breath and looked at the remains of the lunch lady. “Do you want to?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Me too,” added Jeanne. “This was—this was awful. They need to be stopped.”
“Sure, why not?” said Vanitas. “It’ll be fun.”
You and I have very different opinions of ‘fun’, Domi thought, but this time, she didn’t say anything. Someone in the faculty had used them to attack the school—more specifically, someone had used Vanitas to attack the school, but whoever it was had taken advantage of the fact that his party members found him annoying and wouldn’t intervene when people started messing with him in order to pull off the attack. It pissed her off.
If Louis were here, things wouldn’t have ended like this, Domi thought. If Louis were here, today would have gone so much better.
She glanced at Noé. Was he thinking the same? He was chatting with Vanitas now, comparing the afterlife he’d seen with Vanitas’s glimpse of his mother; yes, Vanitas had been in an afterlife, yes, there was a god there, no, he hadn’t seen anyone else around, he’d been freaking out a little bit. It was a dead god. Humans weren’t supposed to see that kind of thing. Noé hadn’t seen a god in the afterlife he’d gone to; all he had seen was wasteland, and blood, and rot, and a big blue moon hanging above it all.
“Do you want to make out,” said Vanitas.
“What?” said Noé.
“Over my dead body!” said Domi.
“Oh, so you can ask people for consent,” said Jeanne. “Eat corn!”
She shoved Vanitas down into the mess of bloody creamed corn, and then the police arrived.
So Louis hadn’t been able to kill the cleric this time. A paladin had gotten in his way, and a wizard had ended the spell before it reached full potency, but that was alright. That was alright. There were other ways, and other times, and it wasn’t as though he were fighting alone. The de Sade family had allies in this, it seemed, allies whom they had loaned their weapon to, and those allies were wielding Louis well. He would complete his purpose; he would spread this misfortune. And when he was done with the cleric and his party—the paladin, the wizard, the fighter—then another threat would be eliminated, and Dominique would be safer than ever.