Cordyceps Twenty
Cordyceps Twenty
This class, I realised rather quickly, was going to suck.
I had no gift or intuition when it came to making stuff like this. There was a reason I’d never delved into the more engineering-based STEM subjects in my last life. I could get the basics, of course, but only on an intellectual level. When it came time to thinking of things in three dimensions, I was pants.
My first creation was a small rubber band-firing gun. It was one of the first projects in the manual and basically only required a few screws, a sort of trigger mechanism made from a bent piece of wire using a nail as a fulcrum, and a small wooden peg to serve as the centrepiece of the mechanism. The hardest part was sawing a few notches and screwing the screw into place at the right angle.
Then I loaded the gun, aimed at the far end of the room where no one was, and fired.
The rubber band did nothing, so I fiddled with it and tried again.
This time, I aimed down to the far end of the room once more, squeezed one eye shut, then pulled on the trigger.
The rubber band flicked backwards and smacked me in the face with a snap.
I heard some giggling from nearby and turned a gimlet eye on some of the other first-year boys. They’d paused in their own projects (though some of them were hardly working) to see me whack myself in the face.
My glare only made them laugh harder, and I supposed that it was kind of amusing.
Then my target stood up and came over. “Can I see?” Silas asked.
“Here,” I said.
He took the rubber-band gun and looked it over. “Yeah, it’s backwards,” he said. “See, the notches are supposed to be on this end, so that when the trigger is pulled it fires it that way. You did it wrong.”
“Damn,” I muttered as I took it back. I compared what I had to the manual, and it did look wrong. “Can I fix this?” I asked.
“Might as well start over,” he said. “But as long as you learned something it’s not a bad experiment. At least, that’s what my dad always says. Do you need help?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” I admitted.
“Yeah, I saw you trying to get the screw into place earlier. You’re really bad with it.”
I wanted to protest, but he was both correct, and I was trying to befriend him, so I decided to keep my indignation to myself and help him help me by fetching new materials from the crates on the far end of the room.
Slias was leagues beyond me, and for a moment I felt like an old person who needed a kid to show them how to work a computer as he basically built a new rubber-band gun right in front of me in a tenth of the time it took me to make one.
“Here you go,” he said, handing me the completed gun, rubber already loaded.
I aimed at the far wall and fired again, and the elastic flicked across the room and against the wall with a faint snap. “It works,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s a really easy project,” he said.
“You’re better at this than I am,” I said. “Did you finish your own?”
He nodded. “I did three of them. I’m going to ask if I can do second year projects next class. Those look like they take a while, at least.”
“You’ve got to have a few skills then, or did you just practice a lot?”
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Silas smiled. “Yeah! My dad helped me get rid of my first class a year ago, and now I have the Apprentice Inventor class. It’s really good for getting skills that let me make stuff.”
“Oh, what were you before that?” I asked.
“Scion of Wealth,” he said with a shrug. “It’s what everyone gets.”
I had no idea what that class did, but I imagined that it probably gave the kids who got it one heck of an early boost.
Class ended soon after that, and I was disappointed when we had to hand in what we’d made. It seemed like [Part Recovery] or [Disassembly] were skills that older students practised with the things the younger students made, so in light of that, it made sense. But I still wanted to keep the elastic gun. I could totally weaponize it, and I definitely needed a ranged option in my arsenal that didn’t just involve me throwing something.
I was about to leave the class when I heard Silas talking to one of the other students. “Yeah! My dad’s supposed to be coming here today. I’m gonna wait for him here. He said he wanted to see if the course was worth taking.”
I felt a shiver run down my spine.
Silas’ father was coming here, now? That meant that one of my targets would be here, in the Academy, and not too far from me. Could I do something about that?
It wasn’t too likely. I might be able to sneak some poisonous mushrooms into a carriage or something, but it would be visible and leave traces. Would he be accompanied by someone from the school? That seemed like a reasonable precaution, but then again, this wasn’t a day and age where people were as worried about that kind of thing.
I moved to the end of the corridor, then checked what I had at my disposal.
It wasn’t much. I had a few skills that I could use to maybe kill someone, but not with any ease, and not without leaving some obvious traces. The best bet I had was some [Dead Man’s Cough] powder that I had in a little satchel in my pocket, but how would I even get that to work?
Still... maybe this would let me get some eyes on Mister Lockhart. That might tell me something about him which might come in handy later, and maybe I could insinuate that I was Silas’ friend, opening up doors later.
Mind made up, I moved to the stairwell nearest to the centre of the school, then looked out a window overlooking the Academy’s entrance. There was a carriage coming into the school, almost too close for me to make out completely with the other buildings in the way, but I did notice the stylized “L” on its side, the bottom half drawn like a gear.
That had to be the Lockhart symbol.
My palms felt sweaty as I waited by the stairs. Then I saw someone coming up the steps. A middle-aged gentleman, with a tophat and cane in his offhand, the same stylized “L” mark on the lapel of a very finely tailored coat.
No one was with him.
I stepped down the stairs, meeting him halfway while fiddling with my satchel with my other hand. “Mister Lockhart?” I asked.
He blinked, only now paying me any attention. “Yes?” he asked.
I brought my hand up, palm filled with dusty spores, and with the added height of being a few steps above him bringing me level to his face, I blew against the dust, spraying it ahead.
Then I ran.
I heard him curse me as an insolent child before he started to hack and cough.
My heart was racing at a million miles an hour as I made it to the ground floor, then started coughing myself. I’d gotten some of the dust in my lungs too? I should have found a way to cover my mouth.
Still, I had a few skills to endure poisons, especially those of my own making. [Poison Blooded], [Basic Poison Resistance], [Poison Handling Expertise], they’d all stack to keep this at the level of a low irritant.
My heart was still thundering away in my chest as I paused in a washroom on the ground floor and washed my hands clean of any evidence. I dusted off my uniform as best I could as well. I’d need to trash this one, maybe steal another first-year’s uniform from the laundry room while I was at it. I didn’t know what kind of skills a detective might have to trace someone in this world, but I didn’t want to risk it.
Then, while my mind was still running through all the trouble I’d just started for myself, the door to the washroom opened and an unfortunate and unwelcome sight greeted me.
“Look what we’ve found,” Harbin said with a mean grin. “Some little dragon-rat, all on its own.”
A couple of his pals spread out behind him, blocking off the exit.
“What do you want, Harbin?” I asked. Then I coughed again, bending over almost double as my lungs burned.
“To put you in your place,” he said.
I was weighing my options when his fist rocketed out and crashed into my nose.
***