Author notes: Sorry all for the delay. I started an assignment for university on Sunday morning (the day I should have posted) and didn’t finish it until about 4pm on Monday… I will post the second chapter tonight after work.
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The door of the room Thomas and Senna were inside was naturally locked, considering the school was closed, but all these doors held manual locks on the inside which didn’t require keys. This was to prevent anyone being locked inside, but it also meant that all one had to do was gain entry to a room and they would be able to access the rest of that area of the school.
A faint moonlight mixed with the light of the distant outdoor lamps filtered in from the windows of class rooms and offices, creating a faint silvery glow inside the school building.
It was still too dark to view anything properly, any objects looked like ominous blotches of black, but one could navigate dows
“Do you see anything?” Senna asked while turning on her torch and shining it around the empty corridor.
“Oh, over there.”
Thomas used his own torch and came to a glass case full of trophies and attached group photos. There was also a wand inside of it that belonged to a Third Circle Mage during his student days.
Senna glanced over the items one by one before using her finger to wipe some grease off the protective glass and asking, “What is it?”
“It’s a display case showing the students’ greatest accomplishments and honor they brought to the school. I imagine it’s used to brag to guests.”
“I meant, is it cursed, or haunted?”
“What? Accomplishments are usually full of joy and other positive emotions. Short of their coach or leader worked them to the bone or filled them with misery, this is the least likely place to find a cursed object. Ghosts would probably avoid it too.”
“…Then why are we investigating it?”
Thomas turned his head and looked at the fae whose crimson pupils almost seemed to glow in the dark.
“Because I thought it was interesting.”
“Stop wasting time!”
Senna huffed and grabbed him by his shirt before dragging him away from the display case and deeper into the school.
The duo glanced over notice boards and investigated the students lockers that lined corridors, but found very little. Thomas did locate a couple of cursed lockers and a trash bin, but the curse on them was barely anything that could be called dangerous.
The bin would enhance the smell of trash, whilst the lockers would cause the contents to fall out onto the student at random times when they opened it.
“How do you even find out the effects of these items?” Senna asked in bewilderment as she watched Thomas spend egregious amounts of time investigating these items.
“Don’t underestimate my passion for cursed items. They all have their unique properties and the way curse energy flows through them. With enough experience, you can deduce some things. For casual items like this, it is not too difficult.
“You say that, but it took you an hour for that last locker.”
“Cough, don’t focus too much on the details.”
Thomas looked away with an impish smile whilst a pair of eyes like rubies in the night bore holes in the back of his head.
“Are there any ghosts or anything else?”
“Actually, none so far.”
The two felt that the school was too quiet, but Thomas was especially sensitive towards it. As someone who could see ghosts, he was used to often crossing paths with these specters. For a building of this age, the absolute lack of any ghosts was extremely unusual.
Thomas glanced out the window at the shifting invisible rift in the sky with an indecipherable expression and stated, “Let’s look around the other buildings in the school and see if we can find any clues.”
Senna and Thomas stood inside an open classroom and gazed out the window into the school grounds were there were several other buildings that were a part of the school.
Senna grabbed Thomas’ head and pushed him to the ground below the window barely moments before a patrol bot shone its search light in from outside.
“Hey, my senses aren’t so du- mmm-mffph-mm-” Thomas started complaining before Senna covered his mouth with one hand while the other had an index finger hovering over her lips as a signal of telling him to be quiet.
The patrol bot must have noticed something as it came closer, the slight rumble of it motor increased whilst the search light in the room brightened.
Thomas guessed that it must have other motion detectors and had detected movement. It also halted its search on the open door to the classroom, leading him to believe it must have a local memory register that this door is supposed to be closed and the discrepancy had raised its alert level.
It scanned its light back and forth through the room just above Thomas and Senna. They watched the shadow of the window frame move back and forth on the rear wall in conjunction to the moving spotlight. Those shadows then begun to move further apart from one another as the bot moved even closer.
The patrol bot was now so close it was practically pressing up against the window and filled the room with light.
Senna was forced to lower her body to the point there was only a hairs breadth between herself and Thomas to avoid being exposed to the light. Her half blonde half crimson hair concealed Thomas’ and her face in a manner that would look like the two were flirting in an empty classroom to an outside observer.
For Thomas however, all he could focus on were the few strands of her hair across his face that were constantly tickling his nose and making him need to sneeze.
The light slowly faded and Thomas took several short breaths in as he was about to sneeze, but Senna quickly pinched his nose and sent him a warning glance.
“Be quiet, it hasn’t left yet,” She quietly hissed under her breath.
His need to sneeze didn’t vanish as he was in the middle of preparing for it, but now both his nose and mouth were sealed and he couldn’t breathe. He twisted and struggled, but Senna’s strength was relentless and she refused to budge.
After what felt like an eternity of torture to Thomas, the patrol bot turned its light back on and scanned the room one more time before its motor hummed to life and it left to return to its patrol route.
“Aaaa- CHOO!”
The moment Senna released Thomas and attempted to get up, he took a final deep breathe before letting out a giant sneeze directly into the beautiful fae girl’s face. To make matters worse, she had also opened her mouth to say something just before he released a shrapnel burst of spittle.
The result was inevitable.
Senna halted momentarily before continuing to get off him and stand. She calmly wiped the spittle off her face and commented in a frigid voice, “Disgusting.”
“Ahem, let’s move on.”
Thomas checked the school grounds outside the window in a carefree manner to ensure the coast was clear before opening a window for the two of them to slip out through.
Outside, he turned around to find Senna sucking on a lollipop she had retrieved from one of her pockets. Her cold expression had subsequently melted into one of pleasant bliss.
“Is this the time to be eating?”
“I am washing my mouth,” She commented in an unperturbed tone. “Your spit tasted disgusting.”
In the most outraged tone he could muster without shouting, he rebutted “My spit is delicious! I’ll show you.”
With a giant grin, he leapt forward and grabbed Senna before opening his mouth wide and revealing a large pool of saliva. He grabbed her face and made as if to pour his drool into her mouth before being abruptly beaten up.
“Why are you so stupid sometimes?”
They stuck to the treeline and hid in the shadows from the occasional patrol bot as they explored the school.
Thomas and Senna had managed to infiltrate several of the school buildings, but others remained impervious.
One such building was the school library, a three story tall structure in the heart of the school. It had an extremely sophisticated security system with its own patrol bot squad, thermal and motion cameras just to name a few, and everything had an electronic lock.
To top it off, Senna could smell the scent of magic that had been deployed around the building in several forms of defensive enchantments.
This over the top protection compared to the rest of the school was because the library housed a large number of magical tomes used for teaching and study material. Whilst not the most valuable magic repository, especially as basic magic could easily be found on the internet, the contents of this building was crucial in the school’s curriculum.
Whilst either of the two could easily tear apart any such defense and smash their way in, they didn’t do so as they didn’t want to be caught. The reason for this could be summed up very briefly.
Inconvenient.
Thomas had the option to destroy his vessel, fend off the pull of the afterlife, before reconstructing it inside the library, but this fell under the same category.
The possibility of Adrian Nikolic entering these areas were near impossible, so it was not a priority to search.
More importantly for Thomas, he had found a cursed pen that would cause wrist pain and accelerate the development of arthritis. He was busy playing with it in his pocket with a silly grin plastered on his face.
“Are there still no ghosts?” Senna asked as they hid in an old annex that had been fully decommissioned due to the school closing down its boarding service.
“Not one.”
“Not even in here!?”
“Nope, nada.”
“Could they have all been swallowed by that whatever in the sky?”
“The tear? I don’t know about ‘swallowed’, but it could likely have an effect. Whether it disrupted whatever connection any ghosts had with their vessels and forced them to pass on, or if it is a purgatory where any creatures are soul based life forms, whether something forced its way out to… feed.”
“Feed?”
“What do you think souls eat? Soul bread and milk?”
Senna rolled her eyes and commented, “You eat normal food.”
“A soul within a vessel doesn’t need to eat, but the vessel does.”
“That doesn’t make any sense?”
“Sure it does. It’s like a mother with a baby in the womb. The baby doesn’t need to eat because it is nurtured by the mother, but the mother needs to eat. When that baby leaved the mother, it then needs to eat.”
Senna wanted to object to that analogy, but she couldn’t find the right words to do so. As per Thomas’ explanation, the vessel was essentially consuming food not only to sustain itself, but also convert that into food for the soul.
“How does that apply to ghosts, then?” The fae girl asked as curiosity got the better of her. “They are outside of their vessels and don’t eat.”
Thomas chuckled in nostalgia as he explained, “I was the same before dying, but fundamental common understanding of ghosts is wrong. They are not souls.”
“…?”
“Let me ask you this. Your memories are stored in your vessel, not your soul. So if a ghost is a soul, how do they retain memories?”
“That… I don’t know.”
“It is because the soul never left the vessel. A ghost is merely a projection of the vessel generated by the soul.”
“Is that why a ghost can’t be killed? Because they are a… hologram?”
“Sort of. It is more of a metaphysical construct than a hologram. With enough juice, it can even interact with and cause change within the world. The link is still there, so there are esoteric arts that can interfere with that link or even follow it back to destroy the soul or vessel.”
“How can a soul remain inside a dead vessel. If the vessel is dead, how do memories remain.”
“There are a lot of soul-vessel related unknowns there, but its not perfect. Memories are stored throughout the body, I like to think of it as the cells having their own form of memory. That is such an interesting thing discovered by science, don’t you think? Cel-”
“Stop getting distracted!”
The duo abruptly hid behind trees as a patrol bot approached with its spotlight skimming past their hiding location.
Once it passed on without detecting their presences, Thomas continued his explanation whilst recalling his experience with ghosts since he returned to the world of the living.
“Ahem, in any case it is not a perfect system. The memories are often broken and disjointed, especially the more damaged or deteriorated the vessel becomes. Without being nurtured, the soul starts to deteriorate and waste away. This causes the ghost to lose its sense of self and become filled with pain and anger.”
Thomas pinched his chin in thought before grinning and following up with, “Of course, if one is strong enough, they can sustain themselves and would have no issues~”
“I feel like you are getting a bit too full of yourself. Should I send you back to the afterlife?”
Thomas raised his hands in mock surrender and chuckled.
It was 3:00am by now so the duo silently departed the school having learned nothing about the missing Adrian Nikolic. They did learn that something strange in the supernatural sense was occurring at this school however.
As they were unhurriedly walking along the streets lit by the dim yellow glow of old street lamps, Senna asked in a voice so quiet it was almost imperceptible.
“How does one erase a ghost if they can’t do magic?”
Thomas glanced at the girl next to him before smiling.
“Just find the remains of the vessel and torch it. Even a fae who can only use body strengthening magic can do that~”
The faint sound of a wrapper being torn apart broke the silence of the night as Senna ruthlessly opened another lollipop and stuck it in her mouth.
“Hungry?”
“The taste your spit came back. It’s still disgusting.”
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