Chapter Text
It’s too much, too much is happening and she’s covered in blood and Kristen Applebees isn't moving and there are no adults around except for the lunch lady’s dead body and Adaine is still holding the fucking ladle.
Someone is pressing something into her free hand. A voice, rough and low, no-nonsense— “You just take those, babygirl, they’ll wind you right down.”
“Wh— what?”
“The pills,” the woman says, guiding Adaine’s hand toward her mouth. “Can you dry-swallow?”
“I don’t know?”
The woman cranes her head back from where she's crouching over Adaine. “Can anyone bring me a fucking glass of water?”
Riz, the goblin kid, rushes over with a paper cone of water from the cooler in the corner. The woman snatches it from him and holds it out to Adaine. She’s got close-cropped graying-auburn hair, severe eyes and a plastic namebadge identifying her as Edie Phoenix, Aguefort Adventuring Academy school nurse.
Adaine takes the pills.
Maybe they're antipsychotics, and this whole day has just been a terrible hallucination.
A few moments later, Adaine can feel the rapid panic rushing through her head start to slow, until her thoughts are moving at a rate that she can actually make sense of. She killed the lunch lady. The corn monster is gone. She killed the lunch lady.
She knows, from her studies of spellcasting, the way that individuals can be good-aligned or evil-aligned. But she can’t figure out if she felt the change, if it’s a physical thing she should be able to sense, the fact that she is now a killer. What will her parents think?
From the corner of her eye, she can see Nurse Edie trying to revive Gorgug. Would it have been better, if she’d died instead of becoming a killer?
Adaine hugs her knees to her chest, still spattered in Doreen’s blood. She was nervous this morning, and she kept reassuring herself all day that it won’t be that bad, that this can be a positive experience.
And now she knows that the voice of encouragement in her head is complete bullshit.
She should have stayed in bed this morning.
Edie manages to bring Gorgug back, and she rushes over to him. “Gorgug! Hey! Are you okay?”
His green face looks pale and sickly, and he shakes his head. “I think I was in hell,” he coughs out.
It’s a challenge to stop herself from asking What was it like? Because she has the idea that she’ll find out herself, sooner or later.
“You’re okay. You’re alright,” she tries to soothe him, and she goes to brush a lock of hair out of his face before remembering that she’s still covered in the lunch lady’s blood. At least Gorgug looks too rattled to be afraid of her.
Behind her, she can hear the goth kid— Fig? She’s pretty sure it’s Fig— shouting at the school nurse.
“You have to save her! You have to bring her back!” Fig is yelling, crouched over the body of Kristen Applebees. “You’re an adult, she’s a kid, how hard can it be to bring her back?”
“I got to the half-orc inside a minute,” she’s explaining to a distraught Fig. “Church Camp over here wasn’t as lucky.”
Rage hits Adaine, fast and sudden. It’s the callous way Nurse Edie talks about Kristen, but it’s also the fact that Edie came over and gave her something for her panic attack before attending to either of the dead kids in the cafeteria. Shouldn’t they have come first? Is there no sense of prioritization, of triage, here?
(Why is she alive and Kristen is dead? Kristen didn’t kill anybody. Kristen was brave. It isn’t fair.)
It’s at that moment that two more adults run into the cafeteria— Adaine vaguely recognizes Jace Stardiamond, the sorcery teacher, but the goliath at his side is a stranger to her. “Edie!” he shouts across the gym. “Bloody hell, what happened in ’ere?”
The school nurse opens her mouth, and something in Adaine snaps. “There was evil corn!” she shouts. “There was evil corn, and it was really strong and it’s our first day we are so weak and we tried to jump on the tables but we couldn’t jump on the tables and then the lunch lady was possessed and she came at me so I attacked her with her ladle but I didn’t realize it would actually kill her and I’ve never killed anybody before and I have this stupid fucking orb that my dad gave me—”
“Sh, sh, we’ve got it,” Stardiamond says, stepping closer to her and holding his hand out like he’s casting some kind of ward. Adaine balks at it, but she’d be angrier if he actually tried to put his hands on her. “Breathe with me, kiddo, alright? Square breaths. In for three, hold for four, out for five.”
“That’s… that’s not a square…”
Riz starts yelling that they need to call the police, and Fabian is loudly declaring to Jace and the other teacher that his father is incredibly important and he’s not going to be happy that a girl died on the first day of school.
Doreen’s dying words come back to Adaine in that moment, and she sends the Message cantrip to the other four kids— Before she died, Doreen told me that we can’t trust the faculty. One of them did this.
She watches Fabian’s eyes grow hard. He looks from the goliath to Jace to Nurse Edie. And then he folds his arms around himself. “I want to go home. Detention’s over, right? Let’s all just go home.”
As they’re ushered from the cafeteria to the car loop outside, Adaine sticks close to Gorgug, who’s still mumbling about hell. She wonders if Kristen was right about Helio, and if she’s somewhere safe and warm right now, surrounded by a field of corn.
His parents pull up in their Gnomish car, and even though it feels crazy, she says, “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
Gorgug bites his lip, tusks pressing into his skin, and he nods. He still looks pale and sick.
But he’s doing better than Kristen Applebees.