Tales From the Fae – Part V: The Academy of Dana
Chapter 17 – Sticks and Stones
::Douglas::
The tall red-headed boy was splashing ice-cold water from a pitcher over his head in the main hall. It had been left there, with a general assortment of snacks after the mid-day meal. His strange if not somewhat messy behavior was drawing the attention of a number of students, but he figured it was about the only thing that was going to calm his highly inflamed lust right about then. He had considered going back to the privacy of his dorm and whacking off, but he couldn’t see himself navigating the long walk with the monster erection he was sporting. He stared down at himself and blushed again. Never in his life had he been so painfully hard. That charm or curse or whatever it was that Rachael had set on his desk had really done a number on him.
“Down boy,” he said quietly to his own willy and then located a nearby towel which he borrowed to dry his head. It was during the brief period that his face was hidden from view that he heard the high, somewhat nasally voice of Shaina Robles as she entered through the door just to his right. He kept the towel covering his face and tried to act like he wasn’t there.
“It serves her just right, I say,” came the girl’s words as they found a table nearby.
“But the nymph said that those tomes were not to be underestimated… It could be dangerous.” Douglas recognized the second voice as the girl’s sidekick, Berla Tomisson, who was possibly the only student in the whole academy that she could call a friend. Upon hearing the heated tone of their conversation, he leaned carefully closer and turned his head a little to try and catch more about the subject. It wasn’t hard. The dark-haired girl certainly wasn’t making any attempt to keep her voice down.
“Yeah? Well, too bad. Let’s see how the bitch likes a full twenty-four hours! With any luck, by tomorrow afternoon Miss Einstein will be a full-on basket case and will be sent home.”
“Shay!” gasped the other girl. “You don’t seriously mean that, do you?”
“Damn right,” came her adamant reply. “And good riddance! Hey, pass me that apple, will you…”
After that, the pair moved off out of range so that he could no longer hear without following them. Pulling off the towel, Douglas frowned over what he had just overheard. What did they mean about “a full twenty-four hours?” Then it hit him. “Miss Einstein” could only be one person… Miranda. The two girls had been mortal enemies almost since the first day, and he knew that Shaina would jump at any opportunity to mock, ridicule, or otherwise demean in any way possible someone that she didn’t like. But a practice tome? If a spell as powerful as the one they endured today could make him feel like he wanted to explode after only an hour or two, he couldn’t imagine what it would do to you after an entire day and night. Turning around, he started to leave in order to find Rachael, but his foot caught on the leg of the table and he fell hard against the stone floor. The last thing he remembered was groaning as he rolled the wrong way trying to get up and hitting his head with a dull thud against the underside of the same table.
“Slow down, Douglas… For goddess’ sake, breathe!” The nymph was half holding up the still gasping young man as he fought to talk and suck in air at the same time. The long run from the main hall had seriously winded him, and Rachael finally rolled her eyes and leaned in towards his face. Douglas’ eyes went wide when he realized that the she was about to kiss him, and he tried vainly to move away. But the Fae woman was far stronger and his struggles lasted only a few seconds as the healing charm found its way into his mouth and down through his overheated body. By the time she broke free again, he was almost breathing normally again, and the strain in his chest had all but vanished. He did notice, however, that his erection was back with a vengeance.
“Now,” she said with her hands on her hips. “Let’s try that again, shall we?”
Douglas was suddenly trying to relate the whole conversation at once all over again.
“Shaina! The tomes… I hit my head… Miranda!!”
“Slow! Go slower, McBride! What about Miranda?”
“I-I think she’s in serious trouble… It has something to do with the practice tomes we used in class today. I think Shaina did something with Miranda’s or with her own. She was talking about it in the main hall and I overheard her say something about it affecting her for twenty-four hours!”
The nymph had a faraway look in her eyes for a moment, then turned toward the door to her class. “Oh shit…” she muttered as she opened the door with a wave of her hand and strode directly to the back of the room where she kept the brass bowl of smooth black stones. Looking into it for a second, she then abruptly bent down and dumped the lot of them onto the floor and started counting. When she was done, she sighed sadly.
“Damn… I should have known,” she exclaimed with a frown.
“What? What’s wrong?”
“One’s missing, that’s what’s wrong,” she answered, turning to him. “And I think I have a pretty good idea where it is.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Douglas, do you know where Miranda is right now?”
He looked confused. “No, I have no idea. I left the class before she did, and then I knocked myself out in the commons for three hours…”
“You what? Never mind, we’ll do it another way,” she said, standing. Douglas followed her out into the hallway where she turned directly to the wall and placed her palm flat against the stone and said, “Show me the location of student, Summers, Miranda.” The wall changed such that its surface glowed with a blueprint version of the Academy, and Douglas was awed at how large the whole complex actually was. It seemed to him that in the past four weeks he and his friends had covered every inch of the place, but from what he could see of the map now before him, the amount of their actual exploration was less than ten percent of the total.
There were two pulsing blue dots that Douglas took to represent himself and Rachael, as they were directly outside her room in the depiction, but no others.
“What the hell…” she mumbled.
“What? What is it? Where is she,” he asked, the fluttering panic returning to his stomach.
“She’s not showing up, but I don’t know why. Douglas, we need to find her, and the sooner the better.”
The young man thought for a moment and then asked tentatively, “The hallways can track people anywhere within the Academy?”
“Well, no. Only a small portion of it actually, but it should cover any area that a First could get to.”
Suddenly, the man’s face brightened. “Are the bathing pools included in that area,” he asked, pointing.
Rachael looked genuinely shocked. “How do you know about…” Then she stopped herself and sighed. “Miranda.”
Douglas just nodded.
“That’s got to be it. Would she go there to be alone?”
“She would if someone else was in her dorm room. She once told me that she sometimes used the place as a refuge to get quality thinking done.”
“That sounds like her all right. Okay, look, I need you to go to her. I think that Miss Robles has planted her own stone someplace on or near Miranda in order to continue the curse. By now, it’s going to be literally driving her insane. You need to get that thing away from her body, at least five feet, okay?”
He nodded that he understood and started to turn. Rachael stopped him.
“Douglas, she’s going to need relief in a major way… Do you understand?”
He swallowed nervously. “Yes. I-I get it.”
“Can you handle that? She’s probably not going to take no for an answer, and in that kind of state, she’s likely to be, um… a bit physical. Trust me, I know.”
He blinked a few times as he realized that she certainly would, and his appreciation for the sultry instructor increased enormously.
“Right,” he said again as he resigned himself to the task. It wasn’t as if he had someone else he was interested in, and to be truthful, he had been somewhat unsuccessfully trying to get her attention since the first day of classes. Now it looked like he was about to get lucky, literally, and it had absolutely nothing to do with him.
“Go!” Urged the nymph as she pushed him in the right direction and he started running down the hall.