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Senna sat behind an antiquated wooden desk in a classroom with 27 others behind similar desks. Her desk was a window seat where the afternoon sun shone across half her desk in a warm yellow glow.
Rather than appreciating the ideal seat for gazing out the window and across the school grounds, she was instead irritated.
She shifted her e-ink notebook out of the sunlight in annoyance as the sun made it impossible for her to read on it properly.
“…Cheap rubbish,” The fae girl muttered under her breath.
The e-ink display was fine and could be seen perfectly fine even in direct sunlight, but the school notebooks were the cheapest kind possible and the heat from the direct sunlight caused it to not be able to track her pen correctly.
Not long after being taken out of the sunlight, he pen strokes were neat again and what she had previously written wasn’t erasing itself like snow melting in the sun.
“Senna,” The teacher, a middle-aged woman wearing glasses, called out to her at random to answer a question, “would you describe a characteristic of language and its importance in society?”
Senna glanced down at her ruined notes that she had been absentmindedly jotting down and came to the realization that she hadn’t actually paid attention to any of it. She instead flickered her eyes to the notebook of the boy in the seat next to her and instantly read what was displayed.
“It is a form of communication. It allows us to express our own thoughts to others and understand theirs. It is the basis of all sophisticated social interaction and a cornerstone in understanding one another.”
“Yes, very good. Next, Alex, can you provide another?”
Sitting next to Senna, Alex looked down at his notebook with a forced smile. What was written was word for word with what the girl next to him had just read out. It was also written in his own words, not something simply transcribed from a text book.
He was unsure how to react to that, but he didn’t dare raise the issue with Senna.
The demi-fallen fae girl was famous within the school. Not only was she the only supernatural species in their year level, but she was extremely difficult to approach and even somewhat frightening to the other students.
There were those that admired her beauty and held schoolyard crushes, or others that were envious of it.
Despite this, most people kept a distance from her and didn’t interact. It wasn’t always like this, but those who approached her never had good ends.
The boys that confessed to her were mercilessly rejected and ridiculed, causing somewhat sinister rumors to begin spreading, whilst a group of girls had attempted to segregate her from others and bully her.
They tried.
Several classrooms had been shocked at the ear piercing screams that came from the second floor girl’s bathroom on that day.
Four girls had called Senna into the bathroom and tried to attack her. They used scissors and their own nails, one of which striking with an open palm. Senna had behaved her best under Thomas’ order to be peaceful, but this pushed her anger over the edge.
The girls were found with all their limbs snapped, bones sticking out, whilst their bodies were bruised and battered. One of them, the leader among the girl group, even had a talent in cultivation and had taken the first step into becoming a Qi Condensation urban cultivator.
Senna was called into the office and the police became heavily involved, yet the matter was somehow buried and the fae girl returned to class. The crippled girls had also been transferred out of the school for medical aid, but they hadn’t returned to this day.
Most assumed it was because Senna was under the Supernatural Lifeforms Protection Act, but those who showed her ill will afterwards often met with injuries and nobody could seek justice for them. Even the teachers had difficulties dealing with this problem.
The girl was simply too violent and unruly when provoked.
If one stayed away from her however, they never came to any harm, and had become an unwritten rule inside the school.
Although this didn’t stop the occasional infatuated dreamer from confessing.
At the end of the school day, students poured out the front entrance of the school like a flood. The fatigue they displayed towards the end of the school day had now been replaced with a new vigor.
It was as if the toll that signaled the end of school was filled with the essence of life.
They streamed down the concrete steps before fanning out across the clean lawns. Some had parents waiting in the nearby carpark, others taking one of the several buses. Some simply walked home, such was the proximity of their homes to the local school.
Senna was one of these students, but there was a clear gap between her and the surrounding students that none seemed daring enough to cross if the fleeting glances were any indication.
She held a small bag of sugar coated bite-sized sweets that she would occasionally eat one of, the faintest look of satisfaction teasing at the corner of her lips as she swallowed them.
Just outside of the school, standing beside a seemingly expensive GLyS branded car, stood the client from a while ago, Mr. Reeds.
His appearance was unkempt, his hair uncombed and beard unshaven. His eyes were bloodshot and even from a distance, his body odor could be smelt. It was the bite of blood and sweat, a twisted a chaotic scent the enveloped his surroundings.
It would take someone sensitive to these matters to be able to tell that though. To the average person, he merely smelt bad.
Senna was one of these sensitive people.
“Miss Senna! You are finally here!” His eyes opened unusually wide as he enthusiastically waved for her to come over.
Not wanting to deal with such a thing, especially in front of her school with every pair of eyes on her, she decided to ignore the man’s existence and walk straight pass him.
He wasn’t about to let her get away as he lunged forward and tried to grab her arm. She deftly shifted her body weight to the other foot and dodged the hand, but he still couldn’t take a hint.
“Miss Senna, please, I brought credits! I need you to… help me. If it’s not enough, I can get more!”
The ears of the nearby students prickled up at what seemed to be insight into the mysterious and secretive life of the most beautiful and infamous girl in their school.
“Did you followed me to school?”
“I… I had to… Please, just come to my house.”
His words became more and more suggestive in the ears of the students, who had begun loitering in the vicinity whilst whispering among themselves. They did their best to appear occupied and not eavesdropping, but it was far too obvious to any third party observer, let alone someone as perceptive as a fae of magical heritage.
No matter what state he was currently in, he was currently a potential client. She quickly pulled out her phone and attempted to call Thomas, but he wasn’t picking up his phone.
Mr Reeds was determined to force Senna into helping him, oblivious of her tremendous strength. Or perhaps he knew, which was why he did this as publicly as possible.
Senna’s actions in the open public like this would affect her and Thomas’ standing in the eyes of the general public, impacting their lives. She couldn’t care less how others saw her, but Thomas was a different story.
Ever since saving her and acting as her guardian, she had done everything she could to support him.
The entire world could turn to ash and scatter across the astral winds in her opinion, but Thomas would be protected.
If only he would work as hard for himself…
…and stop smoking.
“Here, take it!”
Mr. Reeds pulled out a small pile of high value credit chips, much more than she had expected, but this was finally pushing her patience. As he attempted to force the credits onto her, she casually pinched one of his fingers and in a way that it only looked like she was harmlessly pushing him away to the observing students and now parents too, snapped his finger back.
*Crack*
The finger snapped at the knuckle with an audible sound, but Mr Reeds didn’t seem to register it. He just kept attempted to push the credits on her and get her into the car.
Realizing something was clearly very wrong with him, she told him to get into the car and drive.
Thomas lay slouched across the couch and holding a bronze gladius in the air above him, the same cursed gladius that was used in the fight at the police station.
“It holds a curse of bleeding, preventing blood from coagulating and wounds closing. This gladius wasn’t a weapon used on the field of battle, just look at this ornamental handle. No, you belonged to someone important, a minister, perhaps?”
Thomas smelt the blade with the smile of a child who just received a new toy.
“You didn’t bath in the blood of beasts for your curse, no, it was the blood of women. I can see it, the blade of an important man with many wives. You had to look pretty, so you were forced to undergo blood letting, even if you lost your life in the process. Such a practice was still around, so I am all too familiar with the practice.”
He casually pricked his hand with the tip of the blade, drawing a small bead of blood that was absorbed into the cold bronze.
“You absorb blood, becoming even sharper, yet curse your wielder with a thirst for blood that only grows the longer you are held. Formerly known as Bloodthirsty Gladius, your actual title is the Gladius of Titus, dating back over two millennia to the Roman Empire. You shall be catalogue item number 42.”
On the table beside Thomas was a laptop that showed pictures of an ancient roman family, the man clearly wealthy and an apparent senate member. In another window was an old text that briefly described the weapon, whilst other windows vaguely referenced it in their own way, so vague that he could easily be incorrect.
This was how Thomas spent his entire day, lavishing in his hobby of cursed items.
In the past he had fought to liberate these items from innocents and sealed them deep in the church sanctums where the power of god presided. Once buried in these crypts, they could do no harm.
Now, he no longer cared for humanity as he once did. He merely collected them because it was a fun passion.
After jotting down the item name, description, and other notes about the known effects of its curse. He carried the weapon into the back of his home.
Here, there were three bedrooms. The master bedroom was his own, whilst the second was Senna’s. The third however, had been repurposed into a storage room.
This room had an extremely powerful seal cast by a Fifth Circle mage, a previous acquaintance of Thomas’ and important figure in the Mage Tower, a British organization that was dedicated to the research and development of magic.
Placing his hand on the door while humming, pale blue runes and mystical diagrams revealed themselves to the naked eye. They begun shifting around and clicking into place as they verified Thomas’ presence.
*Click*
The latch clicked and the door swung open all on its own, revealing a room full of display cases and storage shelves of myriad designs.
What was most uncanny was that the room was in fact much larger inside than it otherwise should have been. In fact, it was at least twice as large as the master bedroom, despite originally being the smallest room in the house a year ago when he bought it.
“Hmm? Have you gotten slightly bigger?” Thomas grinned and pulled out a tape measure before measuring the width and length of the room. “Oh, 7mm since the last measurement! Nice work guys!”
Despite talking to them, the various cursed items in the room showed no response, true to their inanimate response. Well, there was one item that moved, a small porcelain French poupee doll on a display shelf whose face and eyes uncannily seemed to turn and focus on him whenever he looked away and back again.
It had also moved closer to the edge of the shelf it sat on.
Upon seeing this, Thomas finished hanging the Gladius of Titus on the wall below two other cursed weapons and moved over to the doll.
“Charlotte, what are you doing outside of your cabinet? It’s okay to venture out, but you need to go back to your own place afterwards.”
He picked up the doll with his bare hands and placed her in an antiquated glass cabinet. He didn’t bother locking it as there was no point in doing so.
Charlotte.
With long curly blond hair and equally blonde eyelashes, the doll had an exquisite face of the finest craftsmanship. It had a light red poke bonnet on its head and a dress with lots of frills.
This doll was not to be underestimated because of its beautiful appearance. It enraptured the hearts of children with it’s curse, causing them to bring it into their homes. It would then become a curse upon that family which didn’t stop until they were all dead.
Even if it was discarded or destroyed, it would somehow return in pristine condition. Moving house also proved ineffective as the doll would randomly appear in the new home after a few days.
It was very explicit in this curse and would not attack visitors, nor display any paranormal activity around them. Extended family members were an exception to this, and any visiting aunts and uncles, cousins, or grandparents never made it through the night.
This cycle of deaths repeated itself until Thomas managed to get his hands on it and bring it home.
The seal on the room kept the doll contained, but it had managed to escape twice in the past year, both times targeting Senna and Thomas. The last time it happened, Thomas barely managed to save it from being crushed by Senna. Even if the doll revived itself, Thomas didn’t want to see his maleficent item destroyed.
The reason this room was sealed however was not for the purposes of locking away these dangerous items to protect the outside world. It was to stop people from being able to steal them from him.
It was also the reason for the uncanny situation inside the room. All the curse power generated by the cursed items was sealed away with no means of ventilation. The entire room was steeped in this energy that had grown so dense, it caused reality to twist and distort, the expansion of space being only a side effect of that.
This would continue until the seal of the room could no longer keep the energy contained and would either fracture, or directly burst like a balloon.
Both holy and demonic energy were created from Divine Energy, which was its own divine creative force. This allowed them to alter the world around them, with the more evil energies being more chaotic in how it does so.
Curse energy, the birth source of the majority of cursed items, was considered a degraded form of demonic energy as it did not stem from Divine Energy. But in dense enough concentrations, it could still bring about similar albeit more tame alterations to reality.
This danger could be solved however, so long as Thomas properly sealed the items to prevent them from releasing curse power in the first place.
In any situation, Thomas was far more interested in seeing the changes in his collection, despite Senna’s accusation of him being “irresponsible”.
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