Tales From the Fae – Part V: The Academy of Dana
Chapter 16 – Frustrating Tests
::Miranda::
“Please be seated, class,” announced Rachael, clapping once to get everyone’s attention. “We need to start promptly today as we are going to have a quiz. While the academy has no formal grading system for students, you do have to satisfy me that you have learned enough practical skill in this class to survive in the real world. To that end, I will quiz you at the end of each trimester.”
When we were all seated, Rachael had us take out our writing tablets and quills and we were each handed a separate sheet of parchment.
“I highly encourage you not to cheat, but those of you who feel up to the challenge may attempt to go against my security spells for extra credit. Be advised, the defenses are escalating twelve level charms, the last of which has been given mortal override. It probably won’t kill you before I intervene, but one never knows. I’ll award one extra credit point for each level of my defenses you circumvent.”
I quickly read through my own parchment and decided that each test had to be individualized for the taker since many of the questions on my own sheet required a level of detail that would be nearly impossible to satisfy without near perfect memory. I also saw that my test was written in Fae Common. I only caught a glimpse of the test of the person directly to my left as Rachael handed them out, but it was in standard English. I had stopped worrying about impartiality the second week of class. This test wasn’t to rank me. I already knew where I stood, and so did everyone else, so what did it matter if my quiz was harder than my classmates? It was there to assess no one but myself.
“Also,” continued the nymph, coming from the back of the room with a bowl full of small black rocks that I remembered quite clearly from my earlier experiences with the traps section of our study. My eyes grew wide at the thought of having to concentrate enough to take a difficult exam while fighting off another magical construct. I wasn’t alone. “… We will see how well you do under stress. These tomes have been re-cast with a somewhat simplified version of the same curse that we nymphs fight on a daily basis. Simply take one each and place it near you on your desk. You may turn it back in at the end of class with your tests. The effects of the curse are quite subtle, but you should not underestimate them. They are quite a bit more complex than the simple charms we have worked with in the past, and you will most likely be unable to detect or counter the nature of their immediate effects. Work instead on your concentration. Focus. If you reach a point where you can no longer stand the curse, then you may choose to end your testing and take a reduced score. But don’t be ashamed if you can’t complete this quiz. The stones affect some more than others, and I’m afraid the males in this room will have a significant advantage. Don’t despair if these effects do not diminish immediately after you return the stones. This curse often takes several hours to completely dissipate. Good luck, and please begin.”
I took one of the glossy rocks from the brass bowl as Rachael passed by, and set it near the top of my desk. When I failed to sense any difference in my emotional or physical presence, I just shrugged and started with my answers.
Having an organized mind and near perfect memory has some distinct advantages when taking written exams. I could, for example, read all of the questions first and set a different part of my consciousness to work on answers, while the central ‘me’ flitted back and forth to the various sub-processes, contributing as necessary. When I had completed a question in my head, I would then assign a different part of my ‘me’ to the task of putting it down on paper. The effect, from an external point of view, was that I simply sat there for about half the class staring into space, and then started writing furiously and didn’t stop until the test was complete. It might also seem that the test was in some way easy, which was not the case at all, in fact, by the time I set down my quill, I was sweating quite profusely and found I was having some sort of hot flash. I stared at the black stone and wondered if I was finally feeling the curse that Rachael had mentioned.
Despite the relative difficulty of the exam, I still found I had nearly a third of the class session left when I was done. Remembering Rachael’s extra credit challenge, I called up my MOS and set to work analyzing her creation. It didn’t take long to realize that the Fae woman was quite the troggeyder, and that her defenses were both daunting as well as beautiful to behold. I very gently prodded and tested various paths for the defensive construct as a whole, rather than taking it apart level by level. I noticed at once that there was a hole in the structure that would let me completely bypass the first five levels, but I resisted the temptation and lightly touched the more complicated higher levels.
As time passed, I was so engrossed in the work, that I had been failing to notice the gradually increasing changes from the practice tome still sitting at the top of my desk. When I refocussed my attention and pulled away from the nymph’s defensive matrix for a breather, I gasped in shock. Sexual arousal hit me like a freight train as I finally became aware of what the curse had been silently doing to my libido while I was concentrating elsewhere. It was a hunger… A sexual need like nothing I had ever felt filled me to near insanity. My face was hot to the touch, and there were stars forming at the corners of my vision from the sheer force of my heartbeat. I was so drenched in sweat that my clothes felt heavy against my skin, and my nipples were hard enough that they hurt with each beat of the pounding muscle in my chest.
Down lower, it was worse. Never in my life had I felt so wet between my legs. It was as if someone had set a slippery dessert down on my chair right before I sat down, which had now soaked right through my clothing and over my whole pelvic region. But as aroused as I had become, I knew there was something wrong with the way I felt. A small amount of experimentation revealed what the problem was. I couldn’t cum.
It wasn’t a matter of doing it in public. I had managed that since my eleventh birthday. I wasn’t even incredibly worried about someone catching me at it, especially since everyone present had personally watched me get diddled into a real whopper by one of Rachael’s traps. No, this was something else. Something had gone right into my psyche and grabbed my pleasure center with vise-like control. I could squirm all I wanted, but all it did was make things worse. From the sounds of heavy breathing around me, I figured out that most of the class was having about the same reaction. A few were worse off, and could be heard rocking back and forth in their chairs, probably trying to push themselves over the edge and get some relief.
I moaned, and shook my head to clear some of my own throbbing need that was un-focussing my vision. I knew that I only had to distract myself for a dozen minutes or so, then I could return the tome and go back to my dorm room and twiddle myself into a screaming frenzy. How to escape the monumental distraction was obvious, but I would pay for it. I knew I could just duck back into my deductive exploration of Rachael’s cheater-beater spells and leave my trembling body out in ‘real-time’. But without any resistance, my sexually charged humanity would be a real mess when I returned. What the hell, I wanted those extra credit points.
Sinking back into my MOS took every ounce of willpower I had, and even then I had to give my brain an ‘override’ command to keep myself from snapping back up to full consciousness again. But once I had entered the trance-like state I needed to disassemble the nymph’s defenses, the sexual pressure vanished, or mostly so. In any case, I was far too interested in what I was discovering to care.
Rachael had set up her cheater blocking spell in two parts. The first dealt with sensing that the person was actually cheating, and the second was to administer an escalating scale of ‘repercussions.’ Intertwined within these two parts was a complex lattice of defensive measures to keep someone from circumventing or infiltrating the system as a whole. I could see without prying how the ‘sensor’ part of the spell worked. It was a collection of rules that watched everything from what you were looking at, to scanning the immediate area for possible crib sheets. In effect, it was as though a person were sitting right in front of you, watching your every move continuously. I could think of a few ways to cheat it, but why bother? I wasn’t interested in fooling her defenses, I wanted to break them wide open.
The second part of the spell held a lot more possibilities. Once the sensors determined that you were indeed trying to cheat, the ‘repercussions’ kicked in. The first was nothing more than a verbal warning in your ear. The next was a yell. After that, it started to get physical with a slap on the wrist, followed by a needle-like jab to the palm. It went on and on, with the final level of reprimand being a constriction of the air to the lungs. Very final indeed, but I seriously doubted that anyone would be so foolhardy (or durable) as to actually reach that point, but if they did, perhaps the world might be better off without them anyway.
The stack of repercussions was very carefully shielded within the lattice to prevent someone from disabling them, and even then, each had its own set of triggers that could cause the immediate activation of that repercussion should they detect any tampering. One mistake at level ten and you get an instant searing flame across your back. No, that wasn’t the way in either.
That left the lattice itself, which was by far the most complex aspect of the construction, but also the most vulnerable. It took me nearly all of my remaining time, but when I finally saw it, the answer was simplicity itself.
The lattice was designed to protect certain pieces of magic from being tampered with, and it was fairly smart. It was also quite flexible in that it could come up with methods of detection all on its own in order to adapt to its environment. This made it especially difficult to defeat using any technique that involved ‘slipping through the cracks’, so to say.
But in order to do its job, it had to have a way of determining conclusively the difference between what was to be protected, and a possible intruder. Once I understood this, it only took a moment to find the small and very subtle similarity in each piece of the whole construct. Rachael had used a tag. Apply the tag to a new glyph, and the system would incorporate it as a ‘friendly.’ Without the tag, it was an attack.
I simply fashioned a duplicate tag (which I carefully tested) for my own MOS and voila! I was in like Flynn and free to change whatever I liked. With the class time coming to a close, I hurriedly put together a small ‘notice’ glyph that would activate when Rachael went to grade my test. It informed her that her defensive structure was under my control, and briefly outlined how I had done it. I was pretty giddy when I made the final touches to my message and slipped back into real-time, but my joy was short-lived when I suddenly found myself drowning in uncontrolled arousal.
My heart rate was dangerously high, and once my body had a consciousness back at the helm, it was all I could do to keep myself from falling out of my chair onto the floor. My hands were no longer calm, but shaking so violently that returning to my MOS would be an act of suicide.
“Ughnmmmmmnnnn…” I groaned and pressed my hands between my legs, squeezing them with my thighs. I knew I couldn’t relieve myself that way, but it did help to quiet my trembling digits enough that I could then turn in my test.
I made my way to Rachael’s desk and noticed that I was one of the last to leave the room. Candice, Douglas, and Michelle were all missing, and if they felt half as insane with need as I did, then I had a pretty good idea what they were all doing. The thought of my male student friend brought on an instant increase in my arousal and I gasped. Images of his naked body intertwined with my own flashed through my mind and I trembled.
Breathing hard, I set the exam unceremoniously on the top of the pile sitting on Rachael’s desk, and then plopped the stone into the bowl with a sigh. Taking one last look at the class, I saw that those that remained were probably going to need intervention by the nymph to avoid losing what remained of their sanity. More so, the place smelled like a whorehouse.
Out in the hall, the fresh air helped to clear my mind, but the pulsing, pounding, shaking desire to have sex was not diminishing in the slightest. Rachael mentioned that it might take several hours for the effects to fully dissipate, and when a male Third walked by and smiled, I suddenly realized that I had better get to my dorm room ASAP. I had this nearly overpowering urge to rip his clothes off and mount him right there in the hallway. He looked back with a concerned expression as I panted with lust, supporting myself against the wall until he disappeared around the corner. Yup, drastic measures were definitely called for.
The trip took twice as long as it should have, mostly because I had to stop myself numerous times from attacking some unsuspecting male as we passed in the causeway. By the time I was finally outside my dorm door, I was giving sultry glares to the females I passed as well as the guys. I was starting to panic, and a long series of self induced orgasms in the comfort of my soft bed seemed like heaven right about then. You can understand my disappointment when I started into my dorm and realized that it wasn’t empty.
Having serious sex on the brain, it only took me about two seconds to identify and locate the sharp gasps of a female nearing her moment. I stopped dead in my tracks and ducked as I looked over and found Shawn Hems grinding Candice into her bed. She was on her back with her legs locked around his hips as he thrust deeply into her prone body. Their clothes were scattered about the room as if they had been torn off by a tornado. Even as I crouched there with my mouth open, she started to roar and buck into what was sure to be a real screamer of an orgasm. My heavy blush darkened even more, and I decided that this was probably not the most private of locations to ease my own lust and dove for the mirror. With a single roll, I came up standing in the dimly lit corridors of the pool area. With the image of Candice’s ample bosom bouncing back and forth in my brain, I finally lost it and dropped to my knees whimpering as I shoved my hands down into my pants.