Headmaster of Shadowfrost Part 11

Dawn jumped back when she wiggled the candlestick holder near the bookshelf in Mist's office and she heard a faint click as the bookshelf swung out an inch. "Sorry?"

Mist pulled his attention off the annoyingly cute orange furball that was walking around on his desk like she owned it and looked at Dawn and the bookshelf. "If you unleashed some eldritch abomination, you get to fight it."

"Nope, you're the mage, if it's an eldritch abomination, it's your problem," Dawn argued, fairly sure it wasn't anything too dangerous.

Mist laughed. "And if it's a spirit beast?"

"Sabrina is the expert when it comes to spirit beasts," Dawn pointed out as she carefully tugged on the bookshelf, causing it to swing open and reveal another room.

"I will spank you," Sabrina told Dawn absently as she studied the entrance to the room that was too large to fit in the tower. "Spatial expansion?"

"Or some type of portal," Dawn mused as she studied the edges of the entrance, looking for runes or formation marks or anything that might help explain things.

"Can you sense anything in the room?" Sabrina asked.

"No but that makes sense, there's no point in hiding the room if you could just sense the qi," Dawn replied as she walked into the room that had several leather couches, a bar and a wooden stage along with a number of coffee tables filled with half finished puzzles.

Mist followed Dawn into the secret room that she'd found, curious what they'd find. He glanced at the large sheet of crystal that was mounted on the wall then looked at the wooden stage in the corner of the room. "It looks like some type of private lounge."

"Yeah, it makes me wish we had a way to watch movies…" Dawn trailed off as images appeared on the large sheet of crystal, showing several folders and a stylized eye. "Martial arts lessons, entertainment, crimes and I'm guessing the eye is some type of security?"

"Probably," Mist agreed as he reached up like he was touching one of the folders. "Open…" he trailed off as the martial arts folder that he'd been pointing at actually opened, showing a number of icons for different types of moves. "Huh, I wasn't expecting that to actually work."

"Is that recording our lessons?" Sabrina asked as she studied the pictures of Chan doing different moves.

"Looks like it," Mist replied as he touched one of the icons. "Open?"

Dawn smiled as the recording started playing on the screen showing Chan demonstrating a series of kicks for his class from several different angles. "That's pretty cool. What else does it have?"

Mist closed the martial arts folder as it didn't have a lot of files and tapped the crime folder, causing it to open and reveal an empty folder. "That will probably fill up eventually."

"Probably," Sabrina agreed as Mist closed that folder and opened the stylized eye, pulling up dozens of images on the screen, some of which were moving. "Is that the meditation chambers?" she asked when she noticed the image with Julia's group.

"Looks like it," Mist replied as he glanced over the images, noticing that just about every room in the school other than his tower and the staff rooms were on the screen, including the shower rooms for the students. "At least we'll have a record if people start trying to pull stupid shit."

"Good, we don't need idiots harassing people," Dawn said as she headed over to the bar where she'd noticed a note card leaning against one of the bottles on the shelf.

"No shit," Sabrina agreed, thinking about the idiots she'd had to deal with at her old sect that had talked a good game in front of the elders but were basically little shits the rest of the time.

Dawn grabbed the note and looked at it. "Enjoy the room, the leather is self-cleaning and protected against damage, the bar is enchanted to restock itself and the security system doesn't record the staff rooms unless there's a student in them or someone is doing something that breaks the school rules. Any misbehavior on the part of the students or staff will appear in the crime folder."

"Did the library have a list of the current school rules?" Dawn asked.

"Yeah, it basically boils down to don't damage the school and don't be an asshole," Sabrina told her. "With the exception of the headmaster, the male staff aren't allowed to seduce the students and the female teachers aren't allowed to promise the students extra credit or adjustments to their grades in exchange for anything questionable and not school related."

Mist glanced between Dawn and Sabrina. "While I doubt we'll have a problem, I'm going to be annoyed if any of the staff puts any pressure on the students in that respect."

"Not my style," Sabrina assured him. "And I'll remind Le Wen to make sure her boys sign a consent form before she gags them."

"Probably for the best," Mist agreed, deciding that he wouldn't worry about Le Wen unless he got complaints or a bunch of videos appeared in the crime folder. "Changing the subject, where do you want your tattoos?"

"Can you move the interface or does it always hover over the tattoo?" Dawn asked.

"You can move it and set where you want it to appear but you'd have to touch the tattoo so you'll probably want it somewhere you can reach and somewhere you don't mind me touching at least once since I have to touch the location," Mist told her.

"That rules out sticking it somewhere out of the way, like your butt," Sabrina mused.

"I don't need a tramp stamp and my sister isn't here to complain," Dawn said as she held her left hand out. "Wrist."

Mist walked over, touched her wrist with his finger and cast the spell, causing a tattoo of a noodle monster to appear on her skin. He took a step back. "That should do it, let me grab the bag."

"I'll get it," Sabrina said as she dashed back into the headmaster's office and grabbed the largest bag that was practically overflowing with stones and walked back into the lounge. "If I strip, can I have one of the bags?"

Mist considered the question for a couple of seconds. "No offense but I'm not sure seeing you naked is worth the entire bag, getting more is going to involve jumping into one of the mines and risking my life."

"Tell you what, if you give us the bag, you're free to watch all of the recordings the magic screen is going to make of us fucking the students that Dawn summoned guilt free," Sabrina offered.

"What do I get out of this?" Dawn asked, sort of curious where the crazy librarian was going with things.

"Half the bag and a show?" Sabrina offered as she carefully set the bag filled with magic stones on the coffee table.

'Does it count as workplace harassment if she offered?' Mist mused, not really seeing a problem with giving them one of the bags if they were willing to keep quiet about the cameras.

"Do we have a deal?" Dawn asked Mist, figuring she could always head to the town if she wanted to avoid the cameras.

"If she's willing to put on a show and you both agree to be quiet about the recordings, you can split the bag," Mist offered, more than willing to give them the bag just for not saying anything about the security system. 

"Deal," Dawn agreed, not seeing a problem with that particular arrangement.

"Fantastic!" Sabrina exclaimed as she started stripping out of her clothes, rather happy with the deal.

'Screw it, this isn't work related,' Mist told himself as he watched Sabrina strip, doing his best to ignore all of the ethical questions related to the fact that he was technically her boss.

0o0o0

One of the cultists smiled as Dawn walked over to the stand they'd set up. "Welcome back."

"Thanks," Dawn replied with a somewhat forced smile, a bit creeped out by the fact that the cultist was wearing a bloodstained Ikea outfit today. 'At least he's not dressed like a bunny girl today,' she mused, wondering what it said about her life that she found the bloodstained clothes less creepy than the bunny outfit he'd worn yesterday or the elf outfit he'd worn the day before. "Do you have anything interesting?"

"I always have something interesting," he replied with a smile that was a touch too wide for his face.

Dawn raised an eyebrow. "You had a couple of bottles of frog slime, a lighter and some candles yesterday, that's not exactly what I'd consider amazing."

"And I had an Altaran bolt thrower and a glowing potion the day before. To be fair, lighters usually sell for a decent amount of gold around here," he argued, knowing the good days usually made up for the bad days.

"It's a plastic lighter, you can buy them by the dozen back home and the potion turned out to be a hair loss tonic," Dawn argued, still a bit curious where he got his supplies and costumes since he obviously had connections to other worlds.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure," he replied with a smirk. "But don't worry, I have something you'll appreciate."

"What's that?" Dawn asked as she looked at the collection of odd nicknacks covering the table.

"Several new spells and a Sangara portal device," he replied with a smug grin.

"Let me guess, the batteries aren't included or it takes fifty years to recharge?" Dawn asked, fairly sure there was some type of issue with the device.

"Nothing of the sort," the cultist assured her. "The device was a prototype and the portals only last two minutes before they snap shut and the device can't save the coordinates."

"Where do the portals go?" Dawn asked.

"That's the fun part, you get to pick a vague location, like Paris and you'll end up in a version of Paris or at least France."

"That sounds like a good way to get stuck in a horrible world," Dawn complained, thinking about that Slider's show where they'd gotten stuck jumping between worlds because they couldn't get home.

"You get what you pay for, if the portal actually stayed open or you could take the portal device with you, I'd want a lot more than thirteen spirit stones for it," he replied with a grin, briefly showing about twice the number of teeth that a human should have before everything sort of snapped back and he looked normal enough.

"And the spells?" Dawn asked, trying to focus on the basket filled with spells and not on his disturbing face. 'Buffy would have already stabbed him. Yeah, and Buffy wouldn't have a bunch of useful spells.'

"I have quite the collection today, sixteen spells from across the realms," the man replied as his face changed slightly, looking a bit older and more distinguished.

"What do they do?" Dawn asked.

"I could explain or I could give you a bit of a discount and you can buy the lot for twenty five spirit stones and I'll toss in the portal device, how's that sound?" he asked with a grin.

Dawn considered her options for a couple of seconds before deciding that the portal device was probably worth twenty five spirit stones by itself, which meant the spells were just a bonus. She tapped her spatial ring on the table, dropping twenty five stones on the table. "Deal."

"Pleasure doing business with you," the cultist replied as he handed her the basket and portal device which looked like an alien blaster. "The scrolls are labeled."

"Thanks," Dawn replied as she turned to look at the rest of the booths set up in the courtyard, not surprised that the 'man' and his booth vanished the second she wasn't looking directly at him since it had happened twice before. 'Let's see how badly I got scammed,' she mused as she walked over to a bench and set the portal device down so she could look through the scrolls.

She sorted through the spells, slightly annoyed that the labels on the scrolls only gave her the spell names. 'I guess that's what I get for gambling. Purify crystals, Stone to Flesh, Shrine of Hellish Earth? What the hell does that do? Manipulate Metal: Silver looks simple enough, Portal of Measure? No clue. Summon Candles of Magic? Might be interesting or useless. Summon Naughty Invisible Flying Device seems a bit questionable. Conjure Tome of Insanity, yeah, because that's useful. A spell to destroy masks? Situationally useful.'

She frowned when she saw the next label. 'Arch-angel's Rite of Corruption? Does that make someone better or worse? Mystical Rain of Ruby. Perfected Ritual of Become Canine? Is that a transformation spell or an alternate form? Ritual of Repair Dungeons? Weird. Rain of Slime, School Teacher's Cursed Enchantment? Is that because we're teachers or just random chance? Twisted Invocation of the Bloodstained Arena? Is that like the mirror?'

'Yeah, I should probably just hand all of these to Mist since they look a bit questionable and he's tied to the school so they can't permanently kill him,' she mused as she grabbed the portal device and headed toward her lab.

0o0o0

Le Chan glanced up from his bowl of stew as Mist flopped down across from him splattered with blood and looking exhausted. "You look like shit, what happened?"

"Ignore that," Wen told the headmaster, annoyed at her brother's bluntness. "Have some respect," she scolded her brother.

"Don't worry about it, I'm well aware I look like shit," Mist assured the dark haired young lady, not in the least bit offended by Chan stating the obvious. "I've had about five hours of sleep the last two nights because I'm still trying to get used to the new location and the paperwork for the tournament is driving me crazy."

"Welcome to the Empire, land of endless paperwork," Chan replied with a smirk then went back to eating his stew.

"Yeah," Mist muttered and started working on his own stew.

"That's probably because you didn't bribe the right officials," Dawn teased.

"Probably," Mist agreed after swallowing the bite of stew. "I should have all of the paperwork done by lunch tomorrow, do you think we have a chance of surviving the tournament without our students getting seriously injured?"

Chan finished his stew. "It's hard to say. We're basically slipping in at the last minute and we haven't made any real enemies yet but most of the righteous sects consider the school cursed and corrupted so they might try to make sure we fail or they might just ignore us because we're not important enough to bother with."

"I suspect we'll have some injuries but everyone will have defensive talismans, so they should survive," Sun Ru offered. "I'm more worried about Julia and her family starting a blood feud or something because they crush a bunch of young masters getting to the top."

"We're going to have problems if we win and we're going to have problems with the demonic sects if we throw any of the matches," Lee Wen pointed out. "They'll see us as weak and we're pretty close to some of the more dangerous sects."

"She's right," Chan said. "This is our best chance to win, no one is going to be expecting it and Julia's family are actually decent at martial arts, they just need a couple of tricks up their sleeves and they've got a solid chance with their bloodline as long as they don't slack off."

Mist finished his stew. "I gave Sabrina a bag of magic stones to feed the library, we should be able to get some decent techniques out of it and I was planning on teaching everyone how to use the magic gloves so they can toss lightning."

"We're going to take a beating in the next tournament," Sun Ru warned them.

"If we win this tournament, we can afford to skip the next one," Mist pointed out. "That should give people a chance to cool off, especially if we let 'slip' that we burned a decent amount of resources to pull it off."

Chan smiled as he thought about some of his old drinking buddies. "I know a couple of people that can spread the right type of rumor and it's even true from a certain point of view, we've been burning through the resources you and Dawn have been pulling out of the mirror." 

Sun Ru turned to look at Wen. "Can I talk you into teaching a couple of etiquette lessons in the next couple of weeks? It might help to limit the hard feelings if everyone understands how to avoid offending people."

Wen nodded. "I should have a couple of hours after lunch."

Chan shook his head. "You're not going to be able to avoid offending most of the young masters, they're always looking for reasons to be offended by people beneath them."

"Maybe not but it's a good skill and they're going to need it eventually," Sun Ru argued.

"Fair enough," Chan conceded. "We're going to need more healing potions to get everyone ready, do we have the funds?" he asked Mist.

"We should be fine, the mining team has been cutting through the kobolds like a hot knife through butter so we're building up a decent stash of spirit stones and ingredients."

Dawn finished the last bite of her stew. "I can brew the potions, I just need the ingredients and we're getting most of them from the stuff we're pulling out of the mines and the rest from the town so they're decently cheap as long as people save the bottles."

"We should probably start making bottles out of the glass-steel," Mist suggested.

"I'll post a job and see if anyone wants to contribute," Dawn offered.

"That would be great," Mist admitted, feeling a lot better now that he'd had something to eat.

Sun Ru stood up and looked at Chan. "Can I pick your brain about some style choices for some of the students?"

"Of course," Chan agreed as he stood up, always happy to help the students improve.

"I should put stuff away," Lee Wen said as she stood up and headed for the kitchen, already thinking about the best way to teach a bunch of country bumpkins how to avoid pissing off a bunch of idiots that had grown up with a gold spoon in their mouths.

Dawn watched Sun Run and Lee Chan leave then pulled the basket of spells out of her spatial ring and handed it to Mist. "Do you want an invoice?"

"How much do I owe you?" Mist asked as he started looking through the scrolls.

"I paid twenty five for the lot but that included a portal device," Dawn replied.

"Portal device?" Mist asked as he tapped the spatial ring that Chan had given him on the table, leaving a pile of thirty spirit stones.

"It basically opens a portal to a random Earth for two minutes, you can't save the location and you can't take the portal device with you but I might be able to modify it or reverse engineer it since it's a prototype."

"Nice," Mist replied. "Do you want to keep any of these for Tara?"

"Not really," Dawn admitted. "That particular cultist is a bit sketchy and you're bound to the school. You also have a lot more mana to toss around because of your ability to absorb qi and there's a decent chance that you'll figure out how to make scrolls eventually."

"Hopefully," Mist agreed. He picked up the first spell and used it. "Huh, the crystal purification spell lets you improve the quality of gems and crystals which should increase the amount of mana or qi we can store in them."

"Nice," Dawn replied, figuring that would be useful for some of her projects.

"Huh," Mist muttered when he used the next scroll and realized that he had a way to deal with annoying people that didn't involve killing them, at least not directly. "The Shrine of Hellish Earth spell creates a shrine that teleports someone to a random version of Earth that could best be described as Hell on Earth, so in the middle of the Second World War or an alien invasion or one of those worlds where humanity was mostly wiped out for one reason or another."

"Is it random each time or just when you make it?" Dawn asked.

"Every shrine sends you to the same world though you might not end up in the same place if you're not touching when you use it." Mist used the next scroll. "Huh, the Portal of Measure spell opens a portal to a tailor's shop where you're measured by elves. They won't make you clothes but they'll give you a notecard with your measurements so you can give it to a tailor."

"I was expecting some sort of challenge dimension," Dawn admitted.

"Makes sense," Mist agreed and used the next scroll. "Weird, the Conjure Invisible Disc spell conjures a permanent floating disc that can be set to only work if the person riding it is naked."

Dawn rolled her eyes. "I'm guessing someone was a pervert."

"Or they screwed up the security functions or maybe it was designed for a bunch of nymphs," Mist suggested, not actually sure since the scroll hadn't given him enough background information. He used the next scroll, picking up the ability to manipulate silver. He used the next scroll. "Interesting, the Candles of Magic spell has a number of small bonuses that last until the candle burns out."

"You should make a list."

"Sure," Mist replied as he used the next scroll. "Yeah, okay, I'm never using that, it increases the target's religious fervor, the more mana you use while casting the spell, the more insane they get."

"Arch Angel's Corruption?" Dawn asked as Mist used two of the scrolls.

"Yeah," Mist agreed. "The spell to become a canine turns you into a random canine or a canine of your choice if you have the hair from the type of canine you want to become. Unfortunately, it's permanent and doesn't protect your intelligence so it's basically useless unless you can find a type of canine that naturally has intelligence."

Dawn grinned as she thought about her noodle monster. "Or you need to turn one of the noodle monsters into something useful."

"True. I should be able to teach it the spell since it's on my list," Mist mused, making a mental note to check when he wasn't in the middle of things. He used the next scroll. "Huh, the spell to conjure a Tome of Insanity is sort of interesting."

"Let me guess, it makes you insane?" Dawn asked a touch sarcastically.

"No, it actually eats insanity," Mist replied with a grin as he used the next scroll. "Reading the book leaves the reader more stable and well adjusted than they started."

"Side effects?" Dawn asked, knowing it couldn't be that easy.

"It tends to degrade a person's modesty to a small degree and your faith in religion to a large degree since faith is a form of insanity."

"What about in a world where the gods exist?" Dawn asked.

"I don't know," Mist admitted as he used the last scroll. "We'd have to run some tests."

"What about the cursed school teacher and the arena?" Dawn asked, curious about those spells.

"The School Teacher spell basically lets the caster curse a test with a bunch of nasty but mostly harmless curses that only activate if the student tries to cheat on the test. The Twisted Arena spell summons a dueling arena where you can practice your spells against wooden golems, unlike the normal spell, you can't actually get hurt in the arena."

"That's useful," Dawn mused. "And the rain of slime?"

"It creates a bunch of small slime creatures that will bounce around and try to pounce on things, they're mostly harmless and they can't reproduce. The Rain of Rubies spell conjures temporary rubies to rain down on a person, it's mostly harmless and useless as the rubies don't stick around."

"It would make a nice distraction depending on the crowd and the situation," Dawn argued.

"Fair," Mist admitted as he got to his feet.

Dawn glanced at the door to the kitchen, knowing Wen could probably hear them if she was paying attention. "Speaking of gems, did you manage to get enough hell stones for your project?" she asked, curious what he was using the demonic stones for.

"I have more than enough, I just wanted to pick someone's brain about the specifics, do you have time?" Mist asked as he took his bowl over to the bin where they were supposed to be placed, figuring Dawn was a decently safe person to discuss his dragon vein creation spell with as long as they were in the headmaster's tower behind the wards.

"Sure, what do you need?" Dawn asked as she walked over and put her bowl in the bin.

"Someone to look over my notes and answer some questions about qi flow, the notes are in my office," Mist explained.

"Sure, I've got time," Dawn replied with a smile, curious what he was working on since the hell stones were generally used for demonic rituals.

"Thanks," Mist replied as he headed for the door.

0o0o0