Warren Deimaros, third circle wizard-in-training, sighed. This night could have gone better. He had been sitting on a cold stone bench outside the refectory for the better part of an hour, and his backside was thoroughly numb. Would that he could say the same about his pride. Next to him sat Reyna Hilrest, the most beautiful girl in class AND the most talented evoker in their entire grade. He was finally alone with her late at night, just as he had dreamed of, but she treated him like a malfunctioning servitor. Nothing he said seemed to catch her interest, and it wasn't for lack of trying. "So, did you hear about that guy in fifth grade who managed to cast a fireball on the first try?" Reyna only answered with a corrosive sigh, but he soldiered on. "Didn't even singe his eyebrows. Guy must have had a rod up his sleeve, dontcha think?" Finally she looked at him. "His name is Hambrick. Hambrick Slayhart. As in the Slayhart clan, who specialize in thermal evocation and train their kids in it from age four. Might have something to do with that, dontcha think?" He scratched his neck. "Uh. I guess. But like, a freaking fireball? My dad says a wizard without fireballs is just a nerd in a robe, but I know that even you have trouble casting those!" Again, no answer. She only looked away, gazing down the vacant corridor as if it was the most interesting sight in the world. Warren flexed his fingers to stave off the cold, wishing he could spare the stones for a warmth spell. Why had he even gone along with this? Aside from the obvious reason of course, but he should have known better than to try and impress a girl like Reyna when the Academy was full of wonderboys like Hambrick Slayhart, and Rodrick Thundershaft, and not to mention that annoying, silvery-haired douche who only went by the name of..." "Meylor!!" Reyna called out, and shook Warren out of his ennui. "You know it!" said Meylor as he approached his classmates, sauntering through the dimly lit corridor in that uniquely casual Meylor way, his mutated albino hair waving behind him like a cape. He wore the same roughspun robes as the rest of the students in the Academy, but somehow they just hung better on him. "Apologies for the delay, I got caught up at home! Had to babysit my little sister for a while." "It's okay!" said Reyna and got up from the bench. "Hope she didn't give you too much trouble. And I hope your folks paid you for it, my little bro is such a pain in the ass!" Warren furrowed his brows, seething inside. "He's lucky we bothered waiting for him. It's almost eleven!" Meylor decided to answer Reyna first and ignore Warren second. "Well, I'm here now, so let's do this." He spoke over his shoulder as he kept on walking. "And no, they didn't pay me. My parents are stuck in Elotar, remember?" Reyna smacked her forehead. "Oh my god, Meylor, I'm so sorry! I totally forgot!" She hurried after him, Warren dogging her heels. The trio made their way through the eerily quiet halls of Valatones Academy, its halls dimmed to half light level and most of its staff absent. They passed only a few recharging servitors and night owls plugging for their exams, before they came to an all-too familiar door. Dimensional Studies, said the plaque next to it, but the students only knew it as "maths, more maths and extra maths on top". The only exciting thing that had happened in here was when Warren managed to briefly open a wormhole from one end of the hall to the other, but of course that was before all their education became strictly theoretical. Dimensional magic was awfully mana-hungry. "Really, it's okay," said Meylor to the exasperated Reyna for the third time. He even put his hand on her shoulder, which didn't seem to bother her at all. "They'll be back as soon as they can procure enough spirit stones for the journey home. It's only been a month since the Silence, I'm not the only one who's had to make some changes in their daily life." That much was true. The Party had promptly instated martial law and begun rationing out spirit stones, but the scientists still had no explanation for why everyone on the planet had just stopped regenerating their mana. So far the drones had done a spectacular job of keeping people from getting too enthusiastic about killing each other, but tensions were still high and the societal structures had been upended irrevocably. The newspapers and serials had coined various terms of their own for the calamity, but the one that caught on was "The Silence". "Did you bring the manipulator?" asked Warren. "What? Oh yes of course. I doubt we'll need it to get inside the hall, though. They leave the wards off at night to save stones. Only keep the basics on, like the main door, and the one that kicks out anyone who hasn't got their robes on." Meylor tugged at his sleeve to illustrate what a robe was. Warren wondered how he knew so much about the Academy's security, but decided he didn't want to seem clueless. Just as Meylor had said, the wards were offline and the lock clicked open once Reyna had finished animating the tumblers. "I didn't recognize that pattern," said Warren as they entered the lecture hall. She turned and gave him a rare look of appreciation, and he suddenly forgot his need for a warmth spell. "It's my own invention!" she beamed. "Only works with three tumblers at most, but it's quiet and untraceable. I call it Spiderfingers." "An apt name," said Meylor, who had forged ahead and was standing in front of the objective of their quest. It was a perfectly ordinary, unassuming door in the back corner of the hall, of the sort that usually leads to a maintenance shaft or storage closet. However, draped across it was a single strip of chevroned duct tape with a note saying "NOT IN USE". "I guess it's time to whip out the codebreaker," said Warren. Meylor nodded, and reached into his bag of holding to produce a strange instrument riddled with dials and antennas. He flicked a switch, and and a small screen lit up near the bottom. Warren's eyes went wide. "That's a seventh circle ward manipulator! I've only seen those in high-end catalogs. Mind telling me what those extra dials are for?" "Tenth circle actually," said Meylor. "Dad brought it home from work one day. Not that big of a difference, but it has way more memory and it can detect parameters that aren't in the main scope." He began fiddling with the dials, and the device started making crunching noises, searching for mana structures in the vicinity. "What do you think professor Plurbinquarg keeps in there?" asked Reyna. She seemed a little skeptical, and was kicking her feet to stay warm. Warren pondered whether he should put his arm around her. Meylor turned away from the manipulator and grinned. "I have no idea, babe. But I've never seen him nor anyone else enter that door and yet," he tapped on the device, "there's mana imprints all over the floor. Besides, I checked the architectural plans for the building. That room isn't mentioned on them, and when I asked the janitor he had no idea it was even there. And trust me, that janitor knows everything. And that duct tape with the note? Might as well read "SHADY STUFF IN HERE". That's why we gotta check it out." Warren had to admit, it was hard to dislike Meylor. For how annoyingly handsome and sociable and all the things he was that Warren wasn't, he was also clever and perceptive, and always made it feel like everyone around him was part of his team. But man, was it painful to be a beta. "Wait a minute," said Meylor after returning to the manipulator for a few seconds. "Something's not right here. It says there aren't any wards." "Hey, who needs protection? It ruins the fun!" said Warren. Reyna winced. Meylor kept turning the dials. "No, I mean, of course there's a ward here, nobody locks their stash with just duct tape. But dang it, this is tenth circle tech! Dad told me this thing could crack the freaking Queensborg!" He frowned and looked up from the manipulator, whose display had turned a reassuring green. "Any of you know what professor Plurbinquarg's mana base is? There's no way he set this up himself. No way. And on government stone rations? I know the Academy has huge reserves, but this..." The pair looked at him, confused. Was there even anything above tenth circle? "This is beyond me," he continued. "I'm sorry for dragging you all out here in the middle of the night. But with security that high, we really can't afford to- what are you doing?" Warren had decided that it was now or never. In slow, agonizing movements he had pulled out his keychain, and was about to cut the tape with his locker key. "Warren, what the hell!" shouted Reyna. He was sick of being a beta. Be a man, Dad had told him. He cut the tape. He opened the door. It was a broom closet. Nobody said anything for a while, merely taking in the sight of two neatly placed brooms leaning against the wall, a wash bucket, a dusty crate full of those training marbles they had used back in beginner courses, and a rack of cleaning supplies. Warren started laughing his ass off. Reyna joined in, and Meylor felt extremely cool and very foolish at the same time. "All right," said Reyna finally, and wiped her eyes. "I guess that's life imprisonment for us, breaking into the sanctioned broom closet of eldritch power." Warren chortled. "Yeah, let's clean the place out and split before the drones show up." He elbowed Meylor, who rolled his eyes and facepalmed. "Okay you buttholes, you got me. Lemme just take a look in here, see that we didn't miss anything. I still don't trust that guy." Henry was in his sofa watching a serial. He had dealt his mug of Tonka Brut the final blow and was about to pour himself another, when he heard the alarm going off upstairs. "Ah, shit. Probably a squirrel got up on the roof again. I really ought to put a bulwark around that thing." He set the mug down and shuffled toward the stairs, still pondering what had happened in the last episode. This series had started out so good, with intriguing protagonists and a strong arc, but the second season had mostly been filler. "I guess they got so busy counting their merits, they forgot how to write properly," he mumbled as he turned the key to his study. The door creaked open, and Henry inhaled the musty smell of vaporized spirit stones. The lamps flickered on. He took a step inside, and paused. On his desk was a test tube holder containing an array of blue spheres hooked up to various contraptions. One of them was his not-exactly-legal interdimensional airwave receiver on the roof. Another was the very dubiously legal chemistry equipment he had stashed under a blanket in the alchemy hall, and a third was the hatch door to all the pants-droppingly illegal stuff he kept in his root cellar. However, the spheres in the array were all dark. The ringing came from inside the desk. "Oh powers below. Please don't be the purple one. Please. Not again. Just be the cage traps. Yeah. Some hobo wandered into an unbaited cage trap and managed to set it off. That's it." He hurried over and knelt down, hands shaking, and almost fumbled the incantation. A small drawer containing a handful of colored spheres popped out of a secret compartment. One of them was bouncing merrily around while emitting a shrill chime, rapidly blinking on and off. It was a vibrant purple. "Fuck." "Warren, what did you DO? This is awesome!" Meylor was examining the veil that had appeared in the middle of the closet. Something about the brooms being in pristine condition had set off his instincts, and he had waved Warren over to see if their professor had used any dimensional hoodoo to disguise the place. Dimensional magic was just not Meylor's thing, but Warren had mumbled something about "membranes within membranes", and cast some sort of diagnostic formula. And lo and behold, a wispy, shimmering... thing had appeared in the closet. "Hah!" said Warren. "Hell yeah!" said Meylor. "What is it?" asked Reyna. Warren frowned. He actually had no idea. All he did was cast a spell to map out the local membranes of the physical plane, and suddenly a fully fledged gate had appeared. It was inactive, though. Maybe it had broken down due to lack of mana? "I, uh, I think it may be a pocket dimension." "Of course it is!" said Meylor. "It's the portal to his freaking pleasure palace is what it is! That old pervert, I KNEW he was hiding something! Probably got a bunch of tied up women in there, and a boatload of cash. How do we enter it?" "Pleasure palace?" said Reyna, raising an eyebrow. Warren shrugged. The veil started making a deep humming noise, seemingly reacting to their words. At first it had only been a pinkish shimmer in the air, but within moments it grew to a swirling vortex, shining a strange light that hurt their eyes to look at. Warren found its color hard to describe, the closest he could think of was a deeper shade of purple. His teeth started buzzing as the noise intensified. Meylor's manipulator died out, and they all noticed their meager mana reserves drain away completely. "Guys," said Reyna, "I don't know about this. This doesn't feel like a pocket dimension!" The ceiling lights started popping off one by one. In the eerie light from the portal Warren could see that she had grabbed Meylor's hand. Who was he trying to fool. Still a beta. "Relax," said Meylor and put his arm around her, somehow not alarmed. A gust of foul air blew from the portal, but it only served to make his hair billow poetically behind him. "It's just parlor tricks meant to scare away trespassers. I've seen it before, when I ventured into the-" *SQUELCH* The sphere stopped blinking and went quiet. Then it changed color from purple to red, and Henry could feel his mana reserves shifting. "FUCK!" He grabbed the sphere and threw it at the floor, wishing with all his heart that it would shatter, but it only chipped the stone tile and rolled under a cabinet in the corner. "You gluttonous fucking backstabber of a squid-faced shitmonster! We had a deal! If that was another happy-go-lucky student trying to play adventurer, I'm going to resign next thing in the morning and let them brick over the portal for all eternity! I am not sitting through another hearing!" He balled his fists and marched toward the door, closing the compartment again with a flick of his wrist on the way out. Moments later he had finished casting his new and improved teleportation spell, bypassing the Academy Core. With a loud POP he suddenly appeared in the practice hall where he normally taught, except that he normally didn't teach from three meters above the floor. He briefly remembered his first lessons in Arcane Basics, many many years ago; "The precision of any spell hinges on one's ability to remain emotionless". Yeah, well, the Tonka had a different idea, so fuck whoever wrote that. And fuck gravity. And fuck, now his knee hurt and his reading lenses had shattered. He ignored the pain, cast a quick spell to repair his lenses, failed to do it correctly and cursed as the wireframe disintegrated into fine dust. Muttering under his breath he cast an entirely different spell, and the red, bulbous eye that popped out of his forehead gave him ample confirmation that his lecture hall was an awful mess. Several light bulbs had shattered, lecterns were flipped over, books ripped asunder, training marbles were everywhere and a radial bloodspatter had painted most of the hall in crimson. The metallic taste of butchery hung thick in the air. And at the heart of the carnage was the door he had installed over a year ago, now flung wide ajar. "And fuck you most of all!" he yelled at the door, beyond which a purple veil still lingered in the air. A pair of tentacles slithered out of the veil and unfurled, dropping a pair of cleanly licked femurs, a handful of vertebrae and what seemed like a throughly crushed and very expensive piece of magitech on the floor. *URRRP* The tentacles grabbed hold of each end of the veil, and zipped it shut. For all purposes this was now nothing more than an extremely macabre broom closet. Henry clutched his face and yelled through his teeth. "WHY?! We had a DEAL! Things were going SO well, and now you've ruined it for both of us! Why?" For a few seconds all he heard was his own ragged breathing. Then the space in the broom closet briefly folded in on itself, and two words echoed forth, as if uttered by a giant standing across a field: "PLEEASUURED PAAALAAATE." Professor Henry Plurbinquarg, thirteenth circle warlock, sighed. This night could have gone better.