I didn’t feel much different from when I’d started. Maybe a hair more energized. Wasn’t any shorter, thank the System, and I still looked like an adult.

Success!

All that was left was White Dove.

“Oh great lover of fruits.” She intoned, and the world shook. Her words had Power to them, reverberating through Creation itself. Words spoken, almost directly into my mind, that I could instantly and innately understand. White Dove was Magic.

“Brrrpt!” Auri was very politely saying hello.

White Dove tilted her head at my phoenix friend.

“Cousin. Well-met. It’s been months since we last spoke. You should visit more often.” White Dove toned it down for Auri, then she was back, Speaking to me.

Hang on, months, wait wha-

“Elaine of Earth. Elaine of Remus. Elaine of nowhere, and Elaine of Pallos. The Dawn Sentinel. Butterfly Mystic. The Very Hungry Bookwyrm. Mother of Phoenixes, Traveler of the Fae, Butcher of Ochi and Founder of Medicine. For too long have you evaded my grasp, slipped away through the cracks in time. For too long have you avoided my eye. No More.”

The walls shook at that pronouncement, and I was sweating bullets. The start had gone well, and the sheer number of titles I had that White Dove noticed were almost a point of pride.

Until Ochi.

Then it rapidly went downhill. Her mentioning my love of fruits was also more than a hair concerning.

Not my mangos.

Anything but my mangos.

“You have denied me, and for this sin, I curse you. No more shall you enjoy the kiss of the red fruit. First, you shall not be able to approach anyone who’s eaten one. A lover’s touch denied. A dying patient unable to be saved. A crowd unpassable. Second, the touch of the fruit is your bane, and incurable by your magics. No more shall you shrug off every wound. No more will injuries entirely cease to concern you. No more are you immune to every poison under the sun and moons. Third, should you partake of the fruit, your healing magics will be denied to you until the next day. You shall be forced to watch your friends swell up from an envenomed bite. Watch a child crushed by a cart. Witness an earthquake topple a city, and you shall be powerless to assist.”

Each word was filled with hatred and venom. Every word was like a knife to my heart.

“I curse you.” White Dove spat, before flying off, through a wall.

“Brrrpt?” Auri asked as I clutched my chest.

“I’m alright.” I said, my mind half-frozen.

I’d expected the curse, I just… I was just thrown off kilter. Off-balance.

As far as curses went, at first glance, I’d gotten a fairly gentle one. I wasn’t risking death half the day, unlike the poor trolls. I wasn’t unable to touch anything, like the dude who’d gotten the gold-touch curse. My every word wasn’t going to be changed, unlike the lawyer. I didn’t have some doom hanging over my head. I could walk in the sun, swim in a river, and generally, the fullness of life was still available to me.

Except for one thing, the most important thing of them all.

Frankly, from a high level, it felt like Sextia’s curse. She’d been unable to bathe except in the light of two moons, and even then she’d found a workaround.

“But why did it have to be mangos?” I complained to Auri. Honestly, that was just rude.

“Brrrrpt…?” Auri asked.

“Yes, I - wait. WAIT. Auri, you’re a genius!”

“Brrpt.” Auri puffed up in smug self-satisfaction. Of course she was a genius, she was Auri.

White Dove hadn’t said ‘mangos’ at all! She’d said the red fruit!

Mangos weren’t red! Orange, yes. Occasionally green. Sometimes they were speckled like a rainbow, going from green to yellow to orange, with the slightest hint of red at the end. An extremely overripe one, or a rare variant could be red, yes. The color was one of the things that just made them so perfect. That made them the most divine fruit, the best idea the gods had copied over to Pallos when they were creating the world.

It was one stretch of an imagination to call mangos the red fruit. I suppose like the poor fellow who’d been cursed with simply ‘doors’ I’d been given something of a mystery to solve.

What, exactly, was my curse centered around? Auri and I left the red room to a small crowd.

“Whoa. What’s up?” I asked, facing a wall of dangerous-looking Immortals. They had come here fast, I’d barely been in there ten minutes, start to finish!

“What was that?” One of the elves demanded.

“Uhhhh…” The main reason I’d used one of the dangerous workshop rooms was to have privacy. Big or small, all of White Dove’s curses were designed to inconvenience, if not outright kill, Immortals. A curse - my curse - was a deeply personal thing, and as soon as I figured out what the red fruit was, I’d know what my own personal kryptonite was.

I hadn’t even brought Iona with me, and she hadn’t asked or even seemed surprised. There was a good chance I’d end up telling her, but she recognized that our relationship did still have boundaries. Yay healthy relationships!

My own personal kryptonite that, from the sound of it, was the perfect substance to kill me with. I wasn’t big on being completely paranoid, but I wasn’t completely stupid. The moment ‘this thing can kill Elaine’ got out in the slightest, it was guaranteed to make it to an [Information Broker], and then it’d be out there. Quietly lurking, ready and waiting to bite me one day.

If I mentioned White Dove, it was entirely possible that one of the Immortals here could, with some crazy skill or another, figure out what she’d said in the room. It had happened recently, I bet a Sound Classer could hear the echoes or a Wind Classer could read the currents.

They were still waiting for an answer.

“Um. Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“You shook the entire building.” The same elf crossed his arms and glared.

“Oops? Didn’t think that would happen. Used less than a thousand points of mana, in a reinforced room, didn’t think it was possible.”

I got a sea of disbelieving looks. Most of these Immortals couldn’t shake the building from inside one of the reinforced rooms if they tried.

The student worker who’d originally let me in was at the back of the crowd, and spoke up.

“Wait, did you summon an extra-dimensional being to grow out your hair?” He asked.

“Uhhh… yes! That is an effect that occurred.” I was being awkward and I knew it. “Aren’t my experiments supposed to be private? Especially since I filled out the paperwork?”

There was much grumbling and discussion, but with my steadfast refusal to say anything, and the lack of evidence, like scorch marks or the like, and the fact that I had followed all the rules properly got them off my back.

The crowd eventually dispersed, and I started to make my way back up through the building. Sub-basement 7 meant I was deep, and on sub-basement 2, I encountered an issue.

There was a single, huge spiral staircase to facilitate evacuations and rapid response to issues. I passed by people going down as I was going up, and I felt no need to rush past other people going up either. Just good old polite manners as we all moved through a dangerous building.

I suddenly stopped. It wasn’t like running into a brick wall, it was more like I simply couldn’t move forward. My limbs wouldn’t respond to my commands, my foot wouldn’t lift off the stair. The person behind me almost ran into me, and after a brief moment, cussed me out and moved around me.

My heart froze in terror. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I move?

“Brrrpt?” Auri asked. I gave her a tiny shake of my head.

Or tried to at least. I could move my head one way, but not back.

Alright. I wasn’t entirely frozen. Experimentally, I tried to step backwards, and my body let me. More people were passing by me, and I was starting to make something of a clog in the normal flow of people.

Then like a rubber snapping, I could move forward again. I instantly marked the person who’d passed me by, scanning him from top to toe, memorizing every detail.

[Artisan - 177]

The orc’s tag was nothing special, and nobody else had seemed inconvenienced by him. White Dove had mentioned a fruit, and I’d spent quite a lot of effort improving my senses.

The other thing she’d mentioned was ‘unable to walk through crowds’, and I saw what she meant. If random people had a pseudo force-field or something that I couldn’t cross, that promised to be a pain in the ass. The only thing going for it was the School was a great melting pot of foods, but the rest of the world wasn’t.

I took a deep sniff in, and I could smell everything. From meals to hygiene habits, all the way to the faint odors of people they’d recently been with. I could immediately tell that two people shared a class together. The harpy had just gotten laid. The naga didn’t sleep on a pillow, but on coals. One person had recently been in the library, a second had a frog as a companion, and a third had an omnipresent smell of salt.

Critically, I wanted to know what the orc had been eating. He’d had a stew for lunch, with rice, sausage - pork, with oatmeal and cherries - green bell peppers, red bell peppers, a white onion, carrots, celery, garlic, salt, pepper, water, bay leaves and cilantro. A slice - I assumed, I couldn’t get quantities - of apple pie had been his desert. Apples, sugar, wheat flour, butter, water, cinnamon, salt, nutmeg, lemon juice. Breakfast for him had been Zuppa Toscana. Olive oil, sausages - chicken this time, with pineapple? - red onion, potatoes, tomatoes, oregano, cayenne pepper, salt, pepper, heavy cream, kale, and bacon bits. There were a few more subtle notes that were being drowned out.

I also got a sharp note of strawberries and cream with sugar, a decadent midday snack.

Apples. Red Peppers. Strawberries. Cherries. Cayenne Pepper. My list of candidates was five possible red fruits, assuming White Dove hadn’t been fucking with me.

A few more sniffs got me a wide sample of other people on the stairs, and I rapidly started cross-checking and eliminating candidates.

Cayenne pepper instantly went off the list, a few other people around me having eaten it. I was free and out of the building, and continued to just walk through the crowds of students, strolling in the sunset as I worked through the rest.

Red peppers got crossed off next, and strawberries had clearly been a thing this morning. Shame I’d missed out, strawberries with cream were delicious.

Then it was like I hadn’t been paying attention and ran into a wall. It took a quarter of a second to identify who was giving me grief this time, and another half a second to figure out everything they’d eaten for their last few meals.

One commonality instantly jumped out.

Apples.

Apples?

“Brrrpt?” Auri asked from my shoulder.

“I’ll tell you in a minute, hang on.” I said as I backed up, freed myself, and continued walking back to my dorm.

I thought about what White Dove had said. The practically omniscient White Dove, who’d called out my extra-Pallos origins. Who’d seemed to know about Earth flawlessly.

One line in particular stood out to me as I reflected.

unable to heal until the next day.

Apples.

Days.

Healer.

Did White Dove seriously curse me with an apple a day keeps the doctor away!?